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I've found on StackOverflow an old answer written by me, in which I've used the first form.

Reading it now, it sounds weird and wrong;

I am inclined to think that the second form is the only one correct,
but googling "preventing it to" and "preventing it from" there are 300.000+ results for the first and 700.000+ results for the second!

The 300k+ results for the first form seem way too much for a completely wrong form, hence I've decided to ask here.

EDIT: The original sentence is:

Add white-space: nowrap; to your .layout style declaration.

This will do exactly what you need, preventing divs to wrap.

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Andrea Ligios
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  • Please include the whole sentence. – Tushar Raj Jun 04 '15 at 14:29
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    Preventing NP to VP is ungrammatical. Prevent takes a gerund complement following from; it doesn't take an infinitive complement. – John Lawler Jun 04 '15 at 14:41
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    @JohnLawler: You're right. I wasn't thinking about prevent specifically. – Tushar Raj Jun 04 '15 at 14:44
  • @JohnLawler: Would it be rude if I asked you to take a look at this question? Nobody provided a satisfactory answer. – Tushar Raj Jun 04 '15 at 14:46
  • I think Mari-Lou nailed it. It's an idiom, a freeze, and the plural on the arrow part is kind of irrelevant. All that's needed to make the weapon work once is one bow and one arrow -- but you gotta have both to form the weapon. To make it work repeatedly, you need more than one arrow, and that's the norm. So both singular and plural occur. When you're talking about more than one weapon (instead of more than one piece of ammunition), however, you pluralize the bow part, and then naturally the arrow. Think of it as a weird variety of attorneys general. – John Lawler Jun 04 '15 at 14:53
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    @JohnLawler as suspected, thanks. I'm not in an English-speaking country, and my writing "skills" are more instinct than grammar knowledge. Well, at least I'm happy because after a bit of practice answering on StackOverflow, my mind rings alarm bells that it didn't two years ago... Feel free to turn your comment into an answer. – Andrea Ligios Jun 04 '15 at 14:55
  • This seems to be a common error by non-native English speakers. I've generally assumed that in their native language they use an infinitive in this context, and this results from doing a literal translation. – Barmar Jun 05 '15 at 20:08
  • Applying a no-wrap style disables text-wrap in the div. – Elliott Frisch Jun 07 '15 at 04:27
  • I'd say, if you're about to add "to" after "to prevent", just skip it ; it's so easy ! But with -ing form in this verb "prevent" you must then have "from". – DAVE Mar 10 '16 at 15:08

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but googling "preventing it to" and "preventing it from" there are 300.000+ results for the first and 700.000+ results for the second!

Googling is notoriously inaccurate as a way of gauging relative frequency and correctness. A better method is to use Google ngram.

This is because it uses published work. You can expect the grammar to be be much better than the average internet post.

Google ngram: preventing it to,preventing it from

If you examine the graph you will see that 'preventing it from' is far more frequent than 'preventing it to.'

If you then click on the links at the bottom of that page you will find that many (if not all) of the examples have a grammatical reason for the alternative word order.

If you want to check the variants that have other pronouns, you can do the following:

Googel ngram: preventing * to,preventing * from

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