What is the difference between as and like?
What is the difference between such as and like?
I take many private lessons like (such as) English, French and chemistry.
He runs like a horse.
He runs as a horse.
Are these sentences correct and why?
Learn English – the difference between the words “as” and “like”
as-likedifferencesgrammaticality
Related Solutions
If you say when something happens, you imply it definitely will happen, even if the precise timing is unknown. You use if when there's uncertainty about whether the event will happen at all.
It's quite common — especially in informal contexts — to use when/if as a shorthand way of signifying when, but allowing for the possibility that the event in question may not in fact occur.
Personally I tend to use the composite when/if rather than if/when, for no reason I can clearly explain. I can't easily search for those hyphenated forms to check others' usage, but I can use NGram to check the more extended equivalents. This covers well over a million instances, so I think it's statistically significant. But I have no idea why three out of four people put them the opposite way round to me...
The words mean pretty much the same thing.
In practice, one or the other tends to be preferred in any given context. Like we say that a person "collects stamps" or "collects classic cars", not that he accumulates them. But we say that a person "accumulated a large sum of money" or "accumulated a pile of trash".
"Accrue" is rarely used except with the specific technical meaning that Dilip refers to: something that is due you but that you haven't yet collected. The only examples I can think of off the top of my head are interest on a deposit, as in, "Interest is accrued daily and paid monthly", and vacation time or sick time, as in, "You accrue one and a half vacation days per month worked." (You don't necessarily have to take off one and a half days every month, but you accumulate the right at that rate.) Occasionally people use it to mean "accumulate" in a more general sense, like, "He accrued experience over the course of many years", but that's pretty rare.
I'm grasping for a general rule of when to use "collect" versus "accumulate". Perhaps "collect" has the connotation of selecting individual items, while "accumulate" is used more for an amorphous quantity. You "collect a debt" but you "accumulate wealth" -- the debt is specific but the wealth is general. You "collect fine china" but you "accumulate dishes". Etc.
Best Answer
According to the OED definition of "like":
So there is essentially no difference between "like" and "such as" when used as you described. The two have been interchangeable since the late 1800s.