English

Adjective

different ‎(comparative more different, superlative most different)

1. Not the same; exhibiting a difference.
   • 1886, Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge:

     At Elizabeth-Jane mentioning how greatly Lucetta had been jeopardized, he exhibited an agitation different in kind no less than in intensity from any she had seen in him before.

   • 1971, William S. Burroughs, The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead, page 6

     Enter the American tourist. He thinks of himself as a good guy but when he looks in the mirror to shave this good guy he has to admit that "well, other people are different from me and I don't really like them." This makes him feel guilty toward other people.

   • 2013 July 19, Ian Sample, “Irregular bedtimes may affect children's brains”, in The Guardian Weekly, volume 189, number 6, page 34:

     Irregular bedtimes may disrupt healthy brain development in young children, according to a study of intelligence and sleeping habits.  ¶ Going to bed at a different time each night affected girls more than boys, but both fared worse on mental tasks than children who had a set bedtime, researchers found.

2. Various, assorted, diverse.
   • 2006, Delbert S. Elliott et al., Good Kids from Bad Neighborhoods: Successful Development in Social Context, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 9780521863575, page 19:

     In any case, poor black respondents living in high-poverty neighborhoods are most likely to view their neighborhood as a single block or block group and to use this definition consistently when asked about different neighborhood characteristics and activities.

3. Distinct, separate; used for emphasis after numbers and other determiners of quantity.
   • 2013 May-June, Charles T. Ambrose, “Alzheimer’s Disease”, in American Scientist, volume 101, number 3, page 200:

     Similar studies of rats have employed four different intracranial resorbable, slow sustained release systems—surgical foam, a thermal gel depot, a microcapsule or biodegradable polymer beads.

   Several different scientists all reached this conclusion at about the same time.‎

4. Unlike most others; unusual.

Usage notes

• (not the same): Depending on dialect, time period, and register, the adjective different ‎(“not the same”) may be construed with one of the prepositions from, to, and than, or with the subordinating conjunction than.

  Pleasure is different from/than/to happiness.

  It's different than (or from what) I expected.

  Of these, from is more common in formal registers than in informal ones, and more common in the US than elsewhere; than is more common in the US than elsewhere; and to is more common in the UK, in Australia, and in New Zealand than in the US. Style guides often advocate different from, by analogy with differ from rather than *differ than or *differ to, and proscribe different than and different to.

Synonyms

• distinct, sundry

Antonyms

• alike
• identical
• same
• similar
• undifferent

Derived terms

Related terms

Translations

Noun

different ‎(plural differents)

1. (mathematics) The different ideal.

External links

• different in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam, 1913
• different in The Century Dictionary, The Century Co., New York, 1911

Statistics

Latin

Verb

different

1. third-person plural future active indicative of differō