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That looks an interesting book. (OALD)

‘Look’ can take an NP for its complement by OALD. Now what I’m wondering about is if a person/people could be a subject in the structure, for instance, “They look good guys.” If we can’t, does it have to be “They look like good guys”?

Listenever
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    Be aware that "that looks an interesting book" is not current usage for AmE. We'd always say "that looks like an interesting book". There might be special situations (poetry?) or special cases (set phrases) where a similar construction could be used, but this particular example doesn't work in AmE. – The Photon Sep 10 '14 at 22:44
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    I agree with @ThePhoton and have never heard this usage in AmE. – user3169 Sep 10 '14 at 23:57
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    @user3169, yes, but the British probably use it: "He looked a friendly sort of person." Cambridge – Listenever Sep 11 '14 at 00:17
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    You might want to tag this british-english. – user3169 Sep 11 '14 at 00:20
  • @user3169: I think it's only marginally a BrE issue. Initial reactions to OP's exact form notwithstanding, AmE doesn't seem to be that strongly biased against the construction in general. – FumbleFingers Sep 11 '14 at 14:17

2 Answers2

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As some comments indicate, omitting the preposition in constructions of the basic form "X looks [like] Y" (where X is a noun, not an adjective) seems to be less acceptable in AmE than BrE.

As a Brit, I have no problem with OP's example. In his 1951 novel The Masters, the English chemist and novelist C P Snow wrote...

At a first glance, people might think he looked a senator.

Since C P Snow would definitely be considered a competent writer, I think we can dismiss concerns that the usage is "ungrammatical" in any meaningful sense. And leafing through the results in Google Books for "looks a safe bet" I see several that are unquestionably AmE sources. For example, this is from an American book about baseball...

...it looks a safe bet that Comiskey will have a regular soldier drilling the Sox at their Texas camp.

Comparing US/UK corpuses in Google NGrams for to look a picture, I can't see much evidence of a usage split. And Google Books claims 89 instances of "You do look a picture" (I included do to ensure most/all instances were relevant to the usage under consideration), but there are no written instances at all of "You do look like a picture".

TL;DR: You will encounter some native speakers (particularly, Americans) who have misgivings about the usage in general. But I think even many of those people would be more accepting of my safe bet/picture examples than they would of OP's particular version. It's more a matter of what you're used to hearing, rather than a specific point of "questionable" grammar.

FumbleFingers
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"They look good, guys" means:

  • The speaker is telling some "guys" that "they" "look good". In this example, "they" refers to some people or animals or things being discussed, not the "guys" who are being spoken to. In informal American English, "guys" is ambiguous. It can either mean more than one male person, or it can be a generic second person plural.

"They look like good guys" means "they look like" honest "guys", or friendly "guys", or "guys" who are fun to be around.

Jasper
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