These words have a long, very tangled history, and they are ultimately the same word.
My personal theory is that it did at that point, you know,
occasionally, rain other things, and this was a known scientific phenomena.
Coming up on Word Matters, moving further, or is it farther,
along, and the language's most absurd Deluge idiom.
I'm Emily Brewster,
and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Neil Servin, Amon Shea, Peter Sokolowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
A correspondent describes being perplexed over the near-identical pair further and farther.
When is one to be preferred over the other?
It turns out that the answer to that question is something of a moving target.
We have a letter from Ramona.
First off, I want to say that these words have a long, very tangled history,
and they are ultimately the same word,
and they have nothing to do with far, as far as they're etymologically speaking.
They come from the Old English word fourth, meaning fourth.
F-O-R-T-H, not the number four.
So there's a rule that's taught about further and farther and I think that rule is part of why this pair becomes tricky.
If there were no rule, people would just use them and that would be that.