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Can I End a Sentence in a Preposition? a la Shmoop

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You hear it every morning. You put on your robe, exit your cloistered chambers, greet

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the day with barely-open eyes… and then ask the bishop, “Where is the goat at?”

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And he always responds in that superior tone of his, “He’s probably in school, learning

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how to properly construct a sentence.”

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That bishop can be a real pain sometimes.

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All you want to do is milk a goat to make some yogurt. You don’t want a grammar lesson.

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So, while flagellating yourself in your chambers, you ask the heavens, “Can I end a sentence

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in a preposition?”

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<<booming, God voice>> YES.

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Okay. It’s not quite so simple. There are always exceptions.

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First, what the H-E-double hockey sticks is a preposition?

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A preposition is a word that creates a relationship between two words, usually having to do with

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space or direction, or time.

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For example, The goat went over the fence.

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Over is the preposition, telling what direction the goat went in relation to the fence.

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Another example is: I saw the goat before lunch.

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Before is the preposition, telling when in time the goat was seen.

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Almost all of the time, a preposition needs an object.

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You can’t say: I saw the goat before.

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Before what? Before breakfast? Before the apocalypse?

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However, you don’t need an object if the object is self-explanatory or is elsewhere

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in the sentence.

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For example: What did I just step in?

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If you want to get picky, the one-hundred-percent grammatically correct way to say this is “In

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what did I just step?”

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But no one, not even monks, talk like that. So it’s okay to say “What did I step in?”

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to avoid sounding snooty or pedantic.

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Basically, If there’s no other way to word it without sounding like a person from another

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century, it’s a-ok.

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So is it okay to end a sentence with a preposition?

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Or should we say, what kind of prepositions can you end a sentence with?

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A preposition always needs an object.

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But the object can be elsewhere in the sentence, not just after the preposition.

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If it sounds better with the preposition at the end, then it’s totally fine to do so.

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And you can tell the bishop that, if he has a problem with it, he can talk to US.

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