Are these two phrases different in meaning? When do you use "much" or "most"?
I was reading a book named "The world of words" where I saw this sentence
Substitution in context will help you much of the time.
This was the first time I saw this expression. So I wonder if there are any differences between two.
Best Answer
I suspect the author in that sentence hesitated between often and most of the time: he wanted to indicate that it was helpful very, very often; but he didn't want to go so far as to say that it was helpful more than 50 % of the time, and so he chose a somewhat cowardly expression in between. I think he would have been better off choosing either often or most of the time, or perhaps very often, though I don't think the added intensity of very is really necessary.
Most of the time is an expression indicating that something happens more often than not, usually much more often.
Much of the time I would normally only use where you could not substitute often, a simpler word, which is the case especially when it is about a large chunk or chunks of a period, not merely a frequent number of times.
This means that a large part of this time was spent looking for papers, but "large" could be anything from 1 % to 99 %; if I used most of the time, it would mean that more than half of the time was spent on it.