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Suppose I have a collection of objects (more than two). I wanted to write "They are at a certain distance one from another".

Someone pointed out I should write "They are at a certain distance from one another".

However, the second sentence does not sound right to me.

Who is right?

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  • 3
    They are a certain distance apart.
    – Hot Licks
    Commented Apr 29, 2015 at 0:30
  • 1
    And then there's also , "from each other"
    – Jim
    Commented Apr 29, 2015 at 1:39

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According to the corpus, from one another seems to be significantly more idiomatic than one from another:

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One from another seems to be preferred over from one another by people with a fixation on parsing words in sentences, because the preposition from has a clear object: another separated from (or influencing) one. The meaning of the two expressions is generally interchangeable, but from one another seems to have a stronger connotation of mutual influence, because of the precise construction of one from another.

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