What is the difference between toward and forward

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Add comment. So: "I'm looking toward the future" means you're thinking about the future "I'm looking forward to the future" means you want the future to get here. Sometimes in a novel or play, someone will say something shocking, and a character will respond "that's not toward!

American English speakers often use towards in colloquial speech and writing, and toward sometimes pops up in British English. What other words get different treatment on opposite sides of the Atlantic? Check out this list of words with British and American spellings. Interestingly, both terms toward and towards appeared around the same time. Despite being a British text, he uses toward without an -s , the accepted American English variant today.

As early as , grammarians have debated the proper spelling of toward , with American writers rallying around toward without the -s. However, the reality is there exists no clear-cut rule that would dictate that spelling.

Other usages include meaning "in relation to," such as when talking about your feelings toward something or "for a purpose of," such as when you're working toward something. By a ratio of about to-1, newspapers and magazines in the United Kingdom and Australia favor the use "towards" rather than "toward.

No matter the spelling, the word is always a preposition, so there will always be an object following it. Here are a few examples, showing different types of usage:.

If you were writing these sentences for a U. In most cases, toward or towards is used to indicate either a direction of movement or the reason for taking a course of action. These sentences use toward and towards to indicate proximity to a time or place:.

These sentences use toward and towards to indicate the reason for achieving something:. Because the words mean the same thing, there's no difference to remember except that you'll use "toward" when writing for an American audience and "towards" when writing for the British—and even if you make a mistake, the meaning of the sentence will not be affected.

Over the centuries, the suffixes "-ward" and "-wards" have given rise to several similar words. Today, the same general rule of interchangeability that applies to "toward" and "towards" applies to word pairs such as "forward" and "forwards," "backward" and "backwards," "upward" and "upwards," "downward" and "downwards," and " afterward " and "afterwards.

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