Learn English – Difference between “without” and “with no”

determinersdifferencesgrammarprepositionssyntactic-analysis

What is the difference between the usage of without and with no? For example, without sound and with no sound.

Best Answer

There's no difference in meaning between "without xxx" and "with no xxx", but the former is far more common. For example, "walked with no haste" gets only 3 hits in Google Books, whereas "walked without haste" gets 5310 (an extreme example, but the preference is always there).

The other main difference in usage is we tend to avoid "with no xxx" with gerunds (verb +ing). (Note how "with no caring" virtually "flatlines" on this graph).

enter image description here