Learn English – “Either” in a positive sentence

british-englisheither-orword-order

  1. You have either betrayed me or you have thought of doing it.

  2. Either you have betrayed me or you have thought of doing it.

Which of these two sentences is correct?

Best Answer

They are both correct, and you may want to try reading your paragraph out loud (ideally, to a live human being), in the two versions, to see which one feels like it flows more to your liking.

If you want to, you could make Sentence 1 a bit more succinct:

You have either betrayed me or thought of doing it.

Here's what the Oxford dictionary says about word order with either:

In good English writing style, it is important that either and or are correctly placed so that the structures following each word balance and mirror each other. Thus, sentences such as either I accompany you or I wait here and I'm going to buy either a new camera or a new video are correct, whereas sentences such as either I accompany you or John and I'm either going to buy a new camera or a video are not well-balanced sentences and should not be used in written English.

Note: in my opinion, even in cases where two word orders are possible, there are some situations where the reader might be more likely to get a slightly different meaning from one word order or the other. But this is not one of those cases.

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