"ENDING WITH" VS "ENDING IN"

'With' means accompanying i.e. with someone or something. 'Begin with' sounds better as you continue your journey you have the companion 'with' you. You don't 'end with' as there no more accompanying. It is like you carry a bag and when you reach the end of your journey you put down your bag. So you 'end in'.

Hi There,

Thanks for the insightful response. I appreciate it. It makes sense. Do you have a reference for this, I mean a book or a grammarian of great reputation?

Thanks.

Nikolai

You have to say "begins with" but you can say either "ends in" or "ends with". The "analyst" was mistaken. There is not a lot of written authority for idiomatic usages of this type. I am an educated native speaker of British English with nearly 60 years experience of normal usage.

You may safely disregard talk72000's reply. He sounds a bit like your "analyst".

Hi Contrex,

Thank you for your response. It is a pleasant coincidence that the letter I wrote was sent to an Englishman.

My analyst is not a natural British Speaker (so do I, English is our Second Language). . .and if I recall it correctly, he said that we must use ENDING WITH if it is not followed by a number, but if the object of the preposition WITH is a number then it should be 'ENDING IN', hence 'the credit card number ENDING IN 5612.

Your comments are very much appreciated.

Thanks a lot,
Nikolai

I agree with Contrex, and I would be baffled by the analyst's view myself.

That sounds like a silly rule that somebody invented. Ask him for evidence. Even if it existed, which it doesn't, do you really think people would remember it? As an experienced native speaker, I give you my word that "ending with" and "ending in" are interchangeable and either can be used with numbers or letters.

Surely I will ask him for some proof, maybe on Monday as he is invisible these days.

Contrex, I thank you for your time.

I will make an observation - if you write a sentence e.g. "The Second World War started with the invasion of Poland and ended with the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki", or "My marriage started in passion and ended in murder", it looks better if you use the same word at "start" and "end".

As you can see, there are times when you can write "start in".

You can tell, first of all, Nikolai, that your analyst doesn't have the foggiest notion because this has nothing whatsoever to do with grammar.

You said,

"It would be incorrect to say "A sentence BEGINS IN a capital letter and ENDS IN a period."

It's certainly possible that what you've written, above, could be the convention for English, but it isn't.

You only have to look at direct translations from other languages to see that the same dictionary entry preposition can be used in the "strange" fashion you've used 'in' above.

Look at/in any dictionary, do an exact phrase google search and you will find that it's as natural as, as natural as, well, as natural as spoken and written English.

I'm going to end this post in song/with a song.

na na na na na na na na, hey hey hey, goodbye.