Language tip of the week: harmful

In this weekly post, we bring more useful content from the Macmillan Dictionary to English language learners. These tips are usually based on areas of English which learners find difficult, e.g. spelling, grammar, collocation, synonyms, etc.

This week’s language tip helps with the adjective harmful:

The usual preposition to use with harmful is to (not ‘for’):
✗ Smoking is harmful for smokers and non-smokers.
✓ Smoking is harmful to smokers and non-smokers.
✗ Looking at a computer monitor for a long time can be harmful for the eyes.
✓ Looking at a computer monitor for a long time can be harmful to the eyes.

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