I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

to generalize made up of

transition said:

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

to generalize made up of

They all sound slightly wrong

transition said:

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

to generalize made up of

the first one

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

fixed.

Cymek said:

transition said:

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

to generalize made up of

They all sound slightly wrong

one it eh most correct
two is completely incorrect
three could do with an ‘of’ after comprise…

but now I have been reading the sentences too many time and have that symptom where nothing looks correct.. what’s that called again?

The internet tells me that the last one is most accurate…

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

They’re all correct.

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

the gist of it is quite clear in all three sequence of grunts, so the question of proper English is a bit redundant.

>three could do with an ‘of’ after comprise…

Nooo. That would be definitely wrong.

And two is fine.

• so the question of proper English is a bit redundant

Depends on the target audience…

Bubblecar said:

>three could do with an ‘of’ after comprise…

Nooo. That would be definitely wrong.

And two is fine.

I disagree

Arts said:

Bubblecar said:

>three could do with an ‘of’ after comprise…

Nooo. That would be definitely wrong.

And two is fine.

I disagree

Usage
Comprise primarily means ‘consist of’, as in the country comprises twenty states. It can also mean ‘constitute or make up a whole’, as in this single breed comprises 50 per cent of the Swiss cattle population. When this sense is used in the passive (as in the country is comprised of twenty states), it is more or less synonymous with the first sense (the country comprises twenty states). This usage is part of standard English, but the construction comprise of, as in the property comprises of bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen, is regarded as incorrect.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/comprise

furious said:

• so the question of proper English is a bit redundant

Depends on the target audience…

lot of people probably feel comprise is a bit wanky, it’s got the same amount of letters as made up of, which is fairly much the definition. Add d or s on the end and the word is longer than made up of, the only benefit of the former being it doesn’t have spacings, and still then you may feel like comprised needs of after it.

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

Hmm, can I look at these three examples a different way? Like this:

The university consists of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties make up the university as a whole.
Or
The university contains 5 major faculties.

Which is the best synonym?

Bubblecar said:

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

They’re all correct.

That’s what I was going to say.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Bubblecar said:

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

They’re all correct.

That’s what I was going to say.

It depends upon the context they are used in.

Miss m says 1 or 3.

The Rev Dodgson said:

Bubblecar said:

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

They’re all correct.

That’s what I was going to say.

Apparently if I was paid to use language I would disparage sentences comprised of words including “comprised of”, but since I’m not, I won’t.

madeupof

fixed

another coffee, walk the larry, then to work

Arts said:

Bubblecar said:

>three could do with an ‘of’ after comprise…

Nooo. That would be definitely wrong.

And two is fine.

I disagree

“Comprised of” is often deprecated. The authors of The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation state that “comprised of” is never correct because the word comprise by itself already means “composed of”. CliffsNotes says “don’t use the phrase ‘is comprised of’ “, but does not explain why.

As one of “7 grammar rules you really should pay attention to”, University of Delaware journalism and English professor Ben Yagoda says “Don’t use comprised of. Instead use composed of/made up of.” But he does not explain how this is a matter of grammar rather than lexis, or what is wrong.

The style guide for the British newspapers The Guardian and The Observer says that “The one thing to avoid, unless you want people who care about such things to give you a look composed of, consisting of and comprising mingled pity and contempt, is ‘comprised of’ “. Reuters’ style guide also advises against using the phrase, as does the IBM style guide.

Simon Heffer elaborated on a short warning in his book Strictly English with a longer one in his Simply English: “A book may comprise fifteen chapters, but it is not comprised of them. Those who say or write such a thing are confusing it with composed of. Another correct way to make the point would be to say that the book ‘was constituted of fifteen chapters’ or that ‘the fifteen chapters constituted the book’.” (Yet Heffer himself is one of those who writes this.)

Despite these deprecations, in a 2011 survey, only 32 percent of the writers and editors on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary found “comprised of” unacceptable.

Certain usage guides warn their readers about the meaning of comprise – despite the appearance within respected dictionaries of the use they deprecate (see “Semantics”) – but do not mention “comprised of”. These include Gowers and Fraser’s The Complete Plain Words and the style guides of The Economist and The Times. Other usage compendia have no comment on either “comprised of” or comprise. Although the Oxford English Dictionary notes that certain usages of other words are disparaged, it does not comment on the acceptability of “comprised of” (which it glosses as “To be composed of, to consist of”).

Overt defenses of “comprised of” are uncommon, but Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker considers its deprecation to be one of “a few fuss-budget decrees you can safely ignore”. Oliver Kamm defends it, together with the verb comprise used in the active voice: they are long-established, and Neither is unclear in the context; both are legitimate.” Conversely, Edinburgh University linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum writes “I’d happily comply with an edict limiting comprise to its original sense … I see no reason to favor the inverted sense. There’s nothing virtuous about the ambiguity and auto-antonymy it promotes. It’s easier than you’d think for unclarity to arise about whether an author is saying some abstract X makes up Y or that it consists of Y.”

esselte said:

Arts said:

Bubblecar said:

>three could do with an ‘of’ after comprise…

Nooo. That would be definitely wrong.

And two is fine.

I disagree

“Comprised of” is often deprecated. The authors of The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation state that “comprised of” is never correct because the word comprise by itself already means “composed of”. CliffsNotes says “don’t use the phrase ‘is comprised of’ “, but does not explain why.

As one of “7 grammar rules you really should pay attention to”, University of Delaware journalism and English professor Ben Yagoda says “Don’t use comprised of. Instead use composed of/made up of.” But he does not explain how this is a matter of grammar rather than lexis, or what is wrong.

The style guide for the British newspapers The Guardian and The Observer says that “The one thing to avoid, unless you want people who care about such things to give you a look composed of, consisting of and comprising mingled pity and contempt, is ‘comprised of’ “. Reuters’ style guide also advises against using the phrase, as does the IBM style guide.

Simon Heffer elaborated on a short warning in his book Strictly English with a longer one in his Simply English: “A book may comprise fifteen chapters, but it is not comprised of them. Those who say or write such a thing are confusing it with composed of. Another correct way to make the point would be to say that the book ‘was constituted of fifteen chapters’ or that ‘the fifteen chapters constituted the book’.” (Yet Heffer himself is one of those who writes this.)

Despite these deprecations, in a 2011 survey, only 32 percent of the writers and editors on the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary found “comprised of” unacceptable.

Certain usage guides warn their readers about the meaning of comprise – despite the appearance within respected dictionaries of the use they deprecate (see “Semantics”) – but do not mention “comprised of”. These include Gowers and Fraser’s The Complete Plain Words and the style guides of The Economist and The Times. Other usage compendia have no comment on either “comprised of” or comprise. Although the Oxford English Dictionary notes that certain usages of other words are disparaged, it does not comment on the acceptability of “comprised of” (which it glosses as “To be composed of, to consist of”).

Overt defenses of “comprised of” are uncommon, but Harvard University psychology professor Steven Pinker considers its deprecation to be one of “a few fuss-budget decrees you can safely ignore”. Oliver Kamm defends it, together with the verb comprise used in the active voice: they are long-established, and Neither is unclear in the context; both are legitimate.” Conversely, Edinburgh University linguistics professor Geoffrey Pullum writes “I’d happily comply with an edict limiting comprise to its original sense … I see no reason to favor the inverted sense. There’s nothing virtuous about the ambiguity and auto-antonymy it promotes. It’s easier than you’d think for unclarity to arise about whether an author is saying some abstract X makes up Y or that it consists of Y.”

Thanks Esselte.

Good to see that the anti-grammar Nazis are comprised of Stephen Pinker as well as Mr Car and me.

“It’s easier than you’d think for unclarity to arise about whether an author is saying some abstract X makes up Y or that it consists of Y.”

Well there is certainly a fair bit of unclarity in my head about the difference between “X making up Y” and X consisting of Y.

The only instance in which I would agree that “of” shouldn’t be used is when using “comprises” as a verb.

“It comprises of (this & that)” is unnecessary since you can just say “it comprises (this & that)”.

A 20th-century prescriptive tradition insists that comprise and compose are antonyms looking at the part-whole relation from diametrically opposed standpoints.

Compose takes the bottom-up view. It means “constitute” or “make up.” The parts compose the whole, the tradition claims. (This use of compose is actually not very common, and a sentence like Copper and zinc compose brass sounds thoroughly unidiomatic.)

Comprise, in what I will call its original sense, looks top-down instead. It means “consist of” or “embrace” or “include.” The whole comprises the parts; brass comprises copper and zinc.

Unfortunately, for centuries the verb comprise has also been used to mean compose. I’ll call this the inverted sense. It’s well-established among respectable writers, from the late 18th century on. This Language Log post by Mark Liberman cites examples from Charles Dickens and Herman Melville. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 20th-century quotations, and Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage supplies more, including an occurrence in a letter by Jane Austen (“Sally Fagg has a pretty figure, and that comprises all the good looks of the family”; October 14, 1813)..

Treatments of this topic nearly always mistakenly speak of is composed of and is comprised of as passives. They aren’t. Compose in its musical/literary sense does have a passive (The Moonlight Sonata was composed by Beethoven), but the part/whole sense doesn’t. Nobody says *Brass is composed by copper and zinc. Instead we get Brass is composed of copper and zinc–and there is no understood by-phrase. Here composed is an adjective, requiring (like afraid, fond, proud, etc.) an of-phrase complement.

The grain of truth in the error is that is composed of expresses the inverse of composes, hence has the original sense of comprises; so Brass is composed of copper and zinc is synonymous with Brass comprises copper and zinc.

Now things get even uglier. Comprised is also an adjective, not a passive verb, and takes an of-phrase like compose. Comprised of expresses the inverse of the inverted sense of comprise, which means it expresses the inverse of compose, so it means composed of, which is (roughly) the original meaning of comprise. So when Ashley Montagu writes “It was universally believed that mankind was comprised of a single species” (in Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 1942), I think he means people believed that a single species comprised all of mankind, but if by comprise he means compose, he didn’t say what he meant. (Ye gods, this is confusing! If your head is not spinning right now, you really aren’t paying adequate attention.)

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/02/11/comprise-yourself

should chuck in decompose now, for some fun, which I could use as an alternative to deconstruct, but I won’t :).

esselte said:

A 20th-century prescriptive tradition insists that comprise and compose are antonyms looking at the part-whole relation from diametrically opposed standpoints.

Compose takes the bottom-up view. It means “constitute” or “make up.” The parts compose the whole, the tradition claims. (This use of compose is actually not very common, and a sentence like Copper and zinc compose brass sounds thoroughly unidiomatic.)

Comprise, in what I will call its original sense, looks top-down instead. It means “consist of” or “embrace” or “include.” The whole comprises the parts; brass comprises copper and zinc.

Unfortunately, for centuries the verb comprise has also been used to mean compose. I’ll call this the inverted sense. It’s well-established among respectable writers, from the late 18th century on. This Language Log post by Mark Liberman cites examples from Charles Dickens and Herman Melville. The Oxford English Dictionary gives 20th-century quotations, and Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage supplies more, including an occurrence in a letter by Jane Austen (“Sally Fagg has a pretty figure, and that comprises all the good looks of the family”; October 14, 1813)..

Treatments of this topic nearly always mistakenly speak of is composed of and is comprised of as passives. They aren’t. Compose in its musical/literary sense does have a passive (The Moonlight Sonata was composed by Beethoven), but the part/whole sense doesn’t. Nobody says *Brass is composed by copper and zinc. Instead we get Brass is composed of copper and zinc–and there is no understood by-phrase. Here composed is an adjective, requiring (like afraid, fond, proud, etc.) an of-phrase complement.

The grain of truth in the error is that is composed of expresses the inverse of composes, hence has the original sense of comprises; so Brass is composed of copper and zinc is synonymous with Brass comprises copper and zinc.

Now things get even uglier. Comprised is also an adjective, not a passive verb, and takes an of-phrase like compose. Comprised of expresses the inverse of the inverted sense of comprise, which means it expresses the inverse of compose, so it means composed of, which is (roughly) the original meaning of comprise. So when Ashley Montagu writes “It was universally believed that mankind was comprised of a single species” (in Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 1942), I think he means people believed that a single species comprised all of mankind, but if by comprise he means compose, he didn’t say what he meant. (Ye gods, this is confusing! If your head is not spinning right now, you really aren’t paying adequate attention.)

https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/02/11/comprise-yourself

Hmmm.

Maybe I’m just ignorant, but I prefer to believe that the fundamental premise of that piece is just wrong.

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

“has” eliminates the issue. It is simpler, shorter and active.

“The university has 5 major faculties.”

(I wonder what the minor faculties are. )

Michael V said:

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

“has” eliminates the issue. It is simpler, shorter and active.

“The university has 5 major faculties.”

(I wonder what the minor faculties are. )

Geology

Cymek said:

Michael V said:

pesce.del.giorno said:

I have some confusion about the correct use of the word “comprise”. I have seen it used in different ways.

Which example is correct?

The university is comprised of 5 major faculties.
Or
5 major faculties comprise the university as a whole.
Or
The university comprises 5 major faculties.

“has” eliminates the issue. It is simpler, shorter and active.

“The university has 5 major faculties.”

(I wonder what the minor faculties are. )

Geology

Bar stewards. I didn’t realise that Geology was it own faculty. I alway believed it to be a subset of the Science Faculty…