Grammar: When to use "made of" & "made from"

[Sitaram]

Here is the link to my blog entry, which is lengthy, since I include many examples from the King James version of the Bible, and from Shakespeare.


http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?f...7DEC9C54-3D0C-4D49-83813A5C514AD09B1322783578

This entire inquiry came about because I was in a Yahoo chat room entitled "Books and Literature" and a student asked whether it is more correct to say "the vessel was" "made of"/"made from" "papyrus."

I thought for sure I would find a concise answer from something like Strunk in the search engines.

The only really solid grammatical explanation that I did find was from a French site on English grammar usage.

I would be interested to hear what others find.

 

[novella]

Sitaram, clearly the Shakes. citation of 'made from' implies a different meaning entirely, i.e., "made [to leave] from thee," referring not to what a thing is composed of but an action of going away from something. So I would conclude from the examples on your blog that 'made from' is a newer usage, and that grammatically 'made of' is more correct anyway, as 'of' in that case refers to a derivative relationship, whereas 'from' essentially refers to distance from origin.

 

[StillILearn]

Sitaram, do you drink tons of coffee, or do you do all this on the natch?

 

[Sitaram]

I assume "on the natch" means "naturally", without the aid of artificial stimulants.

I drink a lot of coffee, and have done so since the age of ten.

I touch-type 80 wpm, which speeds up everything, but most of this was skillful use of search engines together with cut and paste, so the blog post took less than one hour. Most of my time was spent browsing through the links returned, and trying different search strings. It does help to have Bible and Shakespeare search engines. I do notice that, in the everyday prose posted, there are numerous paragraphs which contain both "made of" and "made from," with no apparent distinction in the mind of the author. Perhaps the difference between the two phrases is fading, just as the difference between "good" and "well" or "will" and "shall" has faded with time.


There is some university in the South, with an inscription at the library entrance to the effect that half of all knowledge consists in knowing where to look for an answer. I suppose persistence constitutes another 25% of knowledge.

 

[shiraz]

I found something on the subject in Michael Swan's Practical English Usage (a reference book chiefly for ESL teachers and students, published by Oxford University Press):

We usually say made of when we are identifying the material used to make something.

Most things seem to be made of plastic these days.
What are your loudspeakers made of.

When we are thinkinking about the process of manufacture, out of is more often used.

They made all the furniture out of oak. (More natural than ... of oak.)

When a material is changed into a completely different form to make something, we often use make from.

Paper is made from wood. (NOT "Paper is made of wood.")
My mother makes wine from blackberries.

To mention just one of the materials that something is made of we use make with.

'The soup is good.' 'Yes, I make it with lots of garlic'