He affected indifference to my suggestion.I am affected every time I see him standing there.Her knowledge affected the way I think.It also means (2) ‘to simulate’ ‘pretend’ ‘imitate’ ‘assume’.
So, there can be ‘the affect’ or we can say that ‘something is affected’.īoth noun and verb are used, but the verb of this word is the more common, so I will deal with this first.Īs a verb, it means (1) ‘to influence’ ‘move’ ‘touch’ ‘impress’.
We should have effected a rule to avoid this confusion. The rule will come into effect tomorrow.Īs a verb, this means ‘to bring about’ ‘to cause to occur’ ‘to produce as a result’ ‘to put into place’. The first effect of winning this lottery was laughter. The effect of a drug on the body is amazing. So, there can be ‘an effect’ or we can say that ‘something is effected’.īoth noun and verb are used, but the noun sense of this word is way more common, so let’s deal with this first.Īs a noun, it means ‘something brought about by a cause’ ‘a result’ ‘the way in which something acts on something else’. This is both a noun (a thing) and a verb (a doing word). The everyday use of ‘effect’ is the noun, meaning ‘result’ (the effect of this has been to make him proud) or ‘influence’ (he has had such an effect on me).Ĭonfusion arises in this last case, where the noun ‘the effect’ (his words have had such an effect on me) would correspond with the verb ‘affect’ (his words have affected me). The everyday use of ‘affect’ is the verb, meaning ‘to influence’ (his mood affected me greatly), but it also means ‘to feign’ (he affected nonchalance). Strangely, those learning English as a foreign language often grasp these more quickly, as their spelling in other languages is not as close as it is in English. 
Here are two words which cause many problems and head-scratching among the English.
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