A While or Awhile: Which One Should I Use?

You may have seen a while and awhile used interchangeably, but they are grammatically different: awhile is an adverb, but a while is made up of a particle and a noun. If you are trying to modify a verb, or another part of the sentence, you would use awhile. For example, in the following sentence, the verb sat is modified by awhile:

Ella waited awhile in the hotel lobby.

Claire Cook has a useful trick for figuring out when to use awhile: “Use awhile only where you can substitute the synonymous phrase for a time” (169). Let’s look at the previous sentence:

Ella waited awhile in the hotel lobby.

You can substitute for a time and the sentence is still grammatical:

Ella waited for a time in the hotel lobby.

But if you write the following sentence, you must use a while:

Bridget looked at the painting for a while.

You can’t substitute “for a time” in that sentence without making it ungrammatical because of the duplicate preposition “for”:

Bridget looked at the painting for for a time.

So if you don’t know which option to use after reviewing the parts of speech in your sentence, check whether for a time can be substituted into your sentence.

Work Cited

Cook, Claire Kehrwald. Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1985.