Never end a sentence with a preposition

What actually happened

Dryden criticized Ben Jonson for it and edited his own earlier work to remove terminal prepositions, and Robert Lowth's popular 1762 grammar passed the idea along, hedged as a matter of formality rather than correctness. Later schoolbooks dropped the hedge. That is the whole pedigree: one poet's taste, laundered through two centuries of copying.

English is structurally built for it. Phrasal verbs like "put up with" or "look after" are single semantic units whose particles belong at the end, and questions and relative clauses naturally strand prepositions. Forcing them forward produces the kind of sentence Winston Churchill was falsely credited with mocking, and even the apocryphal version, "this is the sort of English up with which I will not put," makes the point: the alternative is not more correct, it is unusable.

Merriam-Webster made this official in a 2023 social media post that briefly went viral, telling people the rule was never real, to widespread disbelief. Formal register still sometimes favors the fronted version for rhythm, and "With whom did you speak?" has its place. But that is style, not grammar, and a generation was marked down for a preference.