Different + preposition or not

  

 

The Oxford English Corpus (OEC) clearly shows the distinctions:

Form	Total occurrences on the OEC	British English	American English
different from	61,475	12,318 (20.1%)	28,481 (46.3%)
different to	9,945	4,371 (43.9%)	1,238 (12.4%)
different than	12,736	793 (6.2%)	8,811 (69.2%)

Different from knows no regional boundaries and is by far the most common pattern of the three. If you favour different than, you’re highly likely to be a speaker of American English. Different to is very frequent in British English, although 12.4% of instances of that phrase are also found in American English.

Read more