I’ve been hearing and reading “how it looks like” more and more. In articles online, in TV shows and movies, … It’s everywhere. And it bugs me to no end. “How it looks like” is grammatically incorrect.
Correct options are “How it looks” or “What it looks like”.
Many Dutch speakers say it the wrong way because they are literally translating from Dutch. But even native English speakers often get it wrong. It’s common for non-native speakers to make this mistake because they might not be familiar with all the language rules associated with “how” and “what.” However, if you want to determine something that you’re unfamiliar with, then “what” is always the answer.
As Grammar How says:
Asking someone “how it looks” is used to ask for a value judgment of a particular thing. A typical response would be to some something up as “good,” “bad,” or some other adjective to describe it. It rarely gets more specific than that.
“How it looks” is seen as the more general of the two questions. It is used to find out what something looks like, typically with a simple one-word adjective answer to keep it as a general or vague value judgment.
- Correct:Can you let me know how it looks to decide if I want to go?
- Incorrect:Tell me how the statue looks like?
- Correct:What can you tell me about how the school looks?
- Incorrect:Do you know how it looks like?
- Correct:I should mention how it looks so you can make a better decision.
- Incorrect:Let me know how the museum looks from the inside!https://grammarhow.com/robots.txt?upapi=trueAD
- Correct:Can you tell me how my makeup looks?
- Incorrect:Could I ask you how my haircut looks like?
- Correct:I don’t like how this game looks.
- Incorrect:I’m not sure I like how it looks like.
We’ll now take some time to look at “what it looks like” and how it works in a sentence. It’s similar to “how it looks” in the sense that we can replace “it” with any object that we want to ask the description of.
“What it looks like” is used to find a more specific description of an object. We ask for someone to explain the object in greater detail to help us decide on it. Usually, we wouldn’t have seen this object ourselves and want to know more about it.
Happy reading,
Loes M.