Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- conj. And not: "Gibson guitars—with their carved tops and necks that are fitted and glued to the body, rather than bolted on—are expensive to make” ( Joshua Rosenbaum).
- prep. Instead of: "diseases in which the immune system plays the villain rather than the protector” ( Sandra Blakeslee).
Wiktionary
- conj. And not.
- conj. Used to indicate that the following alternative is less preferred.
- prep. instead of; in preference to.
Examples
“But, although Jonathan Church's revival is near flawless, the show inevitably feels like a replica of the 1952 movie, rather than a true original.”
“A few months after that about a month before our soon-to-be-adopted child was to be born, the birth mother changed her mind and decided to keep her child rather than put it up for adoption.”
“Response: This is an adult Ethiopian cisticola, Cisticola lugubris, a grass warbler species that is best identified on the basis of its voice rather than appearance I think its song is reminiscent of the buzzing part of a grasshopper sparrow's song.”
The Guardian: Mystery bird: Ethiopian cisticola, Cisticola lugubris
“Umea University Hospital neurologists report that MS rates between 1988 and 1997 in Vasterbotten County, Sweden, were twice as high as incident rates between 1974 to 1988, with “a yearly 2.6% increase in prevalence between 1990 and 1997…mainly attributable to a higher incidence rather than mortality.””
“This wasn't a silhouette which can be easily imagined walking straight off the catwalk and down the Rue Cambon as some Chanel collections can, but the difficult length gave the models a pleasingly confident swagger rather than a sexy strut.”
“Wexler said these kinds of studies have been performed before, so researchers should have known that the sampling equipment they used would be overwhelmed by sandstorms, that samples should not be kept in plastic containers in a hot environment because they could become contaminated, and that samples should be taken every third day - as has been the EPA standard since 1997 - rather than every sixth day.”
“But many T cells are “born” faulty when they are first produced in the bone marrow; they mistakenly react to the body itself, rather than to outside pathogens: they are “autoreactive.””
“Ministers will also propose an extension to the time in which the hours can be used; from 7am to 7pm rather than from 8am to 6pm as at present, fitting in better with the hours of commuters and shift-workers.”
The Guardian: Parents set to benefit from changes to free childcare
“Dr. Mitchell-Smith argues that rather than considering the works of this period as representing conflicts between masculine and feminine identities, we can read these texts as expressions of the balance between two extremes of masculine behavior—courtly amorousness on one end and knightly violence on the other.”
“In general, nevertheless, we shall probably allow Taine's convention that the influence of the Classics (Latin rather than Greek always) on French education has not been favourable to Christianity.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘rather than’.
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phrases
many a, in regard to, with regard to, allow for, in accordance with, thank to, on demand, disallow for, no such, in turn, as to, cutting edge and 29 more...
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my dictionary
able, abnormally, abroad, absent, abstract, acceptable, acceptance, access, accessible, accession, according to, account and 4551 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for rather than.
zc0000 The type converter for modifiers uses a plus sign (+) as a delimiter rather than a comma (,) so that the more traditional syntax to represent key combinations, such as "Ctrl+Alt", is supported in markup. Apr 11, 2010
zc0000 The term CDATA, meaning character data, is used for distinct, but related purposes in the markup languages SGML and XML. The term indicates that a certain portion of the document is general character data, rather than non-character data or character data with a more specific, limited structure. Apr 11, 2010