Difference Between Faraway and Far Away

‘Faraway’ and ‘far away’ look very similar and they mean much the same thing. The biggest difference between the two is that they are different parts of speech.

Both ‘faraway’ and ‘far away’ come from the two words ‘far’ and ‘away’. ‘Far’ means the same as ‘remote’ or ‘distant’: a place that is not close. ‘Away’ is a general term meaning somewhere that is not by the reference point. It is fairly vague. Overall, both ‘faraway’ and ‘far away’ mean a remote place compared to another place, but with some vagueness as to exactly where it is. ‘Faraway’ is simply the two words put together into one.

‘Faraway’ is an adjective. It is used to describe any nouns that are distant.

“Once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a princess.”

“They said that some faraway lake housed a sea monster.”

“There is a plant that grows in the faraway country of Avendale.”

‘Far away’, on the other hand, is an adverbial phrase. It is used to describe verbs.

“I am far away from you.”

“The castle is too far away for us to reach tonight.”

“We shall ride far away and they will never catch us.”

In the first two sentences, the adverbs describe the verbs ‘am’ and ‘is’, both of which are forms of the verb ‘to be’. They describe being far away from something else, which is why the adverb form is used instead of the adjective form.

In terms of use, the word ‘faraway’ is not going to be found in common use. Most of the time, English speakers will only encounter the word in texts for children, such as fairy tales, or in older texts, which means that it is both more childish and more formal than informal speech. Today, it is more common to see ‘faraway’ replaced with ‘distant’ or another synonym.

“They said that the faraway lake housed a sea monster.”

“They said that the distant lake housed a sea monster.”

‘Far away’, on the other hand, is used very often, because it is more versatile than ‘faraway’.

“The castle was far away.”

“It was a faraway castle.”

Of these two sentences, they convey the exact same information about where the castle is, but the first sentence is much more common in English. The second sentence sounds less natural, because it sets the castle up as an object instead of the subject of the sentence. When the description is the focus of the sentence, it is much more natural to describe what the castle is as the subject of the sentence than as the object.

In the sentences above that demonstrate the use of ‘faraway’, it is not the focus of the sentence.

“They said that some faraway lake housed a sea monster.”

The focus of the sentence is the rumor that the lake has a sea monster. The ‘faraway’ part describes the lake, but the sentence would still make sense if you took it away, so it is not focused on describing the lake as far away, as it was in the example above. Between the fact that ‘far away’ is more natural in more situations and the fact that ‘faraway’ is often substituted, as mentioned above, ‘faraway’ isn’t seen as often as many other English words.

To summarize, both describe something as relating to a distant location that is not specified. The word ‘faraway’ is only used to describe nouns and the phrase ‘far away’ is only used to describe verbs, or when an object is described as being in that state. ‘Faraway’ is not commonly used in the English language, since it is often substituted out for synonyms.

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