Ending a sentence with a preposition

Many people have been taught that it is grammatically wrong to end a sentence with a preposition.

This is actually incorrect. In this article we will provide examples.

Some times you must end the sentence with a preposition.

1. Who did you go with?
2. Why did you do that for?
3. Who did you write the letter to?
4. Which country is Barcelona in?
5. Where do you come from?
6. What did you speak about?
7. Go up.
8. Go down.
9. Hold on.
10. What are you looking at?

So we can clearly see that there are many sentences in English that end in prepositions. Questions like ‘Where do you come from?’ are often asked and of course as we can see end in a preposition.

Here are some famous quotes ending in a preposition.

Where did the belief that you cannot end a sentence with a preposition come from?

It is believed that it started off with a poet and writer in 17th century England called John Dryden. Dryden who is not very famous now was very influential back at that time and insisted that sentences should not end with prepositions. This is actually the rule in Latin and some suspect Dryden may have tried to apply Latin grammatical rules to English.

The English language back at that time was different. Dictionaries and  other things were not that common and people were developing the language and Dryden did not like it when Ben Johnson said ‘the bodies that those souls were frighted from’.

However it is fine to use prepositions at the end of the sentence, and in some cases you have to.