How does she look like? (incorrect--in my opinion)I hear this a lot: "That (something/-one) is how (it or s/he) looks like." This construction is substituted for or confused with "what it looks like."
What she looks like is a dream. (correction in the answer)
To remember the two expressions--"how does she look" or "what does she look like," but not a mixture of the two: Never "how does [something or someone] look like."
Now, just to be fair, the questions of how and what are not necessarily the same. How does she look might have the answer given above. It could also mean the same as the what-question which asks for a description in order to recognize someone as opposed to another person.
Let's take a thing instead of a person to illustrate.
"How does it (the situation) look?"Who is making this mistake? In my casual observation, it is speakers of other languages who are using the English they have learned or heard somewhere. Or am I mistaken? Perhaps I am. I heard this on the (vererable) BBC TV last evening.
"Fine. You can proceed safely."
"But what does the road look like up ahead?" (Or, how does the road look ahead?)
"All clear."
. . . how it (the busy train station) looks like . . .Followed by showing the busy train station. So what is going on? The BBC, known for its presentation of an English everyone can understand, and I, a native American English speaker not unfamiliar with BBC and British English, arrested every time I hear what I believe to be an error?
The train station, what it looks like--description or comparison with something else. How the train station looks like--for in this case, what it looks like--description.
If you run ngrams on the two phrases, "how it looks" and "how it looks like," you get the following.
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| how it looks |
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| how it looks like |
And if you run a frequency count on an American English corpus, you get the following.
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| how it looks |
The number of instances is huge.
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| how it looks like |
What to make of these? My reading is that the frequency over time favors "how it looks," without like. There have been periods that have come and gone where the addition of like has taken place, but only to be "corrected" somehow through editing, highs and lows in literacy rates . . . you guess. As for such a dramatic difference in the corpora counts, the difference might be sample sizes and/or characteristics of populations? Clearly, something is or is not going on. Regional differences? generational? types of English (native vs. other) used? As more and more people learn English from non-native speakers not well versed in how the language sounds (not "sounds like"), or is used, we get this, what I call, an error.
I confess, a small bit of a bite of difference when in most instances we think we know what the user means regardless.
