'Succeed', 'Success', 'Successful', or 'Successfully'? | Mastering Grammar

(Last Updated: 11 September 2024)

Succeed, Success, Successful, and Successfully: How Are They Used Differently?

Succeed is a verb, success a noun, successful an adjective, and successfully an adverb:

✅ Chris wants to succeed in finance.

✅ Chris wants to achieve success in finance.

✅ Chris wants to become a successful financial consultant.

✅ Chris successfully completed his course and is now a financial consultant.

Successful and successfully usually present no problems to learners of English; it is the first two—succeed and success—that often cause confusion. Learners tend to misuse the noun success in sentences where the verb succeed should be used:

❌ We will success if we work together.
✅ We will succeed if we work together.

❌ Whether we success or fail depends on your support.
✅ Whether we succeed or fail depends on your support.

❌ If you want to success in securing a loan, you need to be prepared and organised.
✅ If you want to succeed in securing a loan, you need to be prepared and organised.

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Examples from the Media

The education world has long been filled with debate about how to improve troubled schools and help kids succeed academically and otherwise. —The Washington Post (2018)

Hard work and believing in yourself are a few of the secrets to Toronto District School Board's three top graduates' success. —Toronto Star (2021)

Exeter University offered successful medical students £10,000 and a year's free accommodation to defer until 2022, after the number of successful applicants with the course as their first choice shot up from 20% to 60%. —The Guardian (2021)

Apartment residents who successfully challenged the contract that earned Meriton an extra $310,000, in a practice that is now outlawed by the NSW Government, and which tied the home-owners to caretaker fees that ran into millions, now hope they have set a precedent that will help other apartment dwellers in a similar position. —The Sydney Morning Herald (2022)

Practice

Fill in the blanks with succeed, success, successful, or successfully.

1. Chris ________ completed his master's degree in Linguistics.

2. The performance was a huge ________.

3. You must work hard if you want to ________.

4. Most parents are willing to do whatever it takes to help their children ________.

5. Anna is a highly ________ businesswoman.

6. Failure is the mother of ________.

Answer Key

1. successfully    2. success    3. succeed    4. succeed    5. successful    6. success

Recommended Further Reading

'Success Story' or 'Successful Story'?
'Succeed to Do' or 'Succeed in Doing'?

Real-World Examples of Misuse

Succeed is a verb, and success is a noun.

1. Success is a noun, but the sentence requires the verb succeed.
2. Then is unnecessary in this context.
3. We accept responsibility for our mistakes and the consequences of those mistakes.
4. The original sentence was missing a grammatical object (them).
5. Aware of is more direct and common than self-aware about.
6. When used as a transition word to link two independent clauses (they never complain and they find solutions to problems), instead should be preceded by a semicolon, a dash, or a full stop, and followed by a comma. This conforms to standard punctuation rules.
7. The correct preposition to use with solutions in this context is to, not on.
(Source: Sing Tao Daily)