You Can End a Sentence With a Preposition

There is a story, almost certainly invented, in which Winston Churchill responds to an editor’s fussy rearrangement with: this is the sort of English up with which I will not put.

Churchill probably never said it. The joke survives because everyone recognises the problem it describes.

Where the rule came from

In 1672 the poet and critic John Dryden objected to sentences ending in prepositions in Ben Jonson’s writing. His reasoning was that Latin does not do it — in Latin a preposition is bound to its noun and cannot be stranded at the end of a clause.

English is not Latin. It is a Germanic language, and Germanic languages strand prepositions freely. Dryden was proposing an improvement, not describing a rule, and eighteenth-century grammar books copied the proposal until it hardened into folklore.

The same project produced the ban on splitting infinitives, and it failed for the same reason: it was trying to make English behave like a language it is not descended from.

What every authority says

Chicago calls the supposed rule “an ill-founded superstition”.
Merriam-Webster records preposition stranding as standard and long-established.
AP permits it.
Fowler’s called avoiding it a “cherished superstition” in 1926.

There is no modern style guide that forbids it. This is not a live dispute among people who study the language; it is a live dispute only between people who were taught it and people who have since checked.

The sentences that cannot avoid it

Some constructions strand a preposition and have no alternative at all:

What are you looking at? There is no natural version.
She is worth listening to. Cannot be rearranged.
That is the book I told you about. About which I told you is grammatical and stilted.
It is nothing to worry about.

Phrasal verbs make it unavoidable. In give up, look after, put up with, the particle is part of the verb rather than a preposition governing a noun. Moving it does not tidy the sentence; it dismantles the verb.

When to move it anyway

Not for correctness — for rhythm. A sentence that ends on a weak preposition can land flat, and the last word of a sentence carries emphasis you may not want to spend on to.

This is the outcome we had hoped for. Fine.
This is the outcome we hoped for, worked for, and were eventually denied. Better, because the sentence keeps going.

In very formal writing — a legal document, a formal address — the moved version can suit the register. That is a stylistic judgement about tone, which is a legitimate reason. “Because it is a rule” is not.

One genuine caution

Watch for prepositions that are simply unnecessary:

Where is it at? → Where is it?
Where are you going to? → Where are you going?
Off of the table → off the table

These are worth cutting, but not because they end a sentence. They are worth cutting because they add nothing — which is a rule that actually holds everywhere.