As a high school English student, I used to make a lot of grammar mistakes, despite my passion for the language. My faults lay mostly in the fact that I sped through my work, paying more attention to creativity instead of focusing on the correct grammar, punctuation and spelling usage. One of the errors that my teachers caught me out on often was the inclusion of the phrase “a lot”, which I would often misspell as alot or allot.
This mistake is quite a common one to make, especially since they are spelled very similarly and sound exactly the same. They have completely different meanings however, in fact, one of them is actually not a word and means nothing at all!
1. The term “a lot” usually refers to “many” or “to a great extent”.
For example:
1.1. Sarah had a lot of money hidden under her matters.
1.2. Thank you, my friend, your kindness means a lot to me.
2. Allot is a verb and it can be defined as: to apportion by shares or to set aside for a special purpose. For example:
2.1. The farmers were allotted one acre of land.
2.2. The teacher allots one hour for homework.
3. And then you get alot, the most common misuse of the term. “Alot”, if spelled this way, is not actually even a word, yup, it has no meaning at all – so, don’t use it!
Now that we know that “a lot” is the correct choice for our sentences, unless we are referring to the divide of something, here are a few tricks to help remember this tidbit of information:
A lot is a lot of words (so more than one word).
OR
You cannot say “alittle,” so you cannot say the opposite the same either, which would be “alot.”
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