Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[Smallray]

Dear All,

When we are saying the sentences like

Of the two girls, Lenny is "the" more beautiful.
Do we need to add the word "the" here or we can simply say

Of the two grils, Lenny is more beautiful

???

Plz help me out with this Q. Thanks a million!!!

[2006]

You can say "Of the two girls, Lenny is more beautiful."

The first sentence should say "Of the................is the more beautiful one."

[redset]

You use the in this case when you're contrasting two things, in this case two girls. It's basically a superlative, except you use 'the more beautiful' instead of 'the most beautiful' because you're only comparing two people:

'Of the two girls, Lenny is the more beautiful'
'Of the three girls, Lenny is the most beautiful'
'Of the four girls, Lenny is the most beautiful'

Basically use 'the more (something)' as a superlative when comparing two things, and 'the most (something)' when comparing three or more.

I guess you could say 'of the two girls, Lenny is more beautiful' in informal speech but I don't think it's really grammatically correct. Because you're starting the sentence with 'of the two girls', it means you're going to be saying that one of these girls has the greatest measure of some attribute or quality - you're going to be using a superlative, basically. If you just want to say 'Lenny is more beautiful' without the the, use a comparative:

'Lenny is more beautiful than the other girl'