on account of vs owing to

[Annakrutitskaya]

Hello!

One of the meanings of these prepositions is "because of". Are they interchangeable, or is there a difference in the meaning?

Britain expects first deflation in more than 50 years owing to supermarket price wars. www.retail-week.com/.

Stagnating industrial manufacturing and postponement of investment owing to high costs of capital will have an adverse impact www.transparencymarketresearch.com

Would "on account of" change the meaning of these sentence, or add a different sense to it?
Thank you!

 

[Enquiring Mind]

Hello AK, "on account of" means the same as "owing to" (or "because of"), when it describes the reason something happens, and it wouldn't change the meaning in your sentences.

There's a BBC English page about it here. (source: bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish)

 

[The Newt]

I'm not a big fan of "on account of," which I think sounds too colloquial (at least in the US). I would use "due to high costs..."

 

[Annakrutitskaya]

Hello AK, "on account of" means the same as "owing to" (or "because of"), when it describes the reason something happens, and it wouldn't change the meaning in your sentences.

There's a BBC English page about it here. (source: bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish)

Thank you very much!

 

[Annakrutitskaya]

I'm not a big fan of "on account of," which I think sounds too colloquial (at least in the US). I would use "due to high costs..."

Thank you very much! Interesting. And suits me perfectly, because I am used to say "due to", and have only recently learned about "on account of", which is too long and sounds clumsy to my non-native english speaker ear

 

[FoolishQuestions]

Though 'due to' is very common, I think everywhere, in modern English, I've read in a grammar book that we should use 'due to' only after the verb be and not after the third form of a verb or at the beginning of a sentence. We should rather start such a sentence with 'owing to', and use 'because of' after the third form of a verb since 'due to' itself means caused by.

 

[IoannaFk]

Hello there!

I understand that "on account of" and "owing to" can be used interchangeably. But could you please explain to me why the correct answer is only "on account of" in the following part of an exam practice test?

He sent the family a gift .... the help they had given him.

a) via

b) owing to

c) by way of

d) on account of

The correct answer, as I said, is "on account of". Why "owing to" can't be right too?