Two friends of mine are having a rather vociferous debate. Is ‘a lot’ one word or two?
One friend insists that due to the space seperating ‘a’ and ‘lot,’ that ‘a lot’ is two words.
The other friend counters that a word is anything that can be found in the dictionary. To this friend, it does not matter if there is a space seperating ‘a’ and ‘lot.’ If there is one clear meaning, it is a word.
Both friends think the other friend’s argument is utter codswallop. 300 yen rests on the line. Dopers, I beg your wise council. What say yee?
No I will not deal with it. You cannot condemn ‘alot’ without condemning ‘cannot’. Popular usage is the language and alot of people use ‘alot’. It is a valid word if you’re not some inconsistent arbitrary OCD prescriptivist nitpicker with too much anal-retentive time on your hands.
The OP said his friend claims that since “a lot” is listed in the dictionary it is one word. That’s the OP’s friend’s definition. I’m merely saying that there are other two word phrases listed in the dictionary, I don’t think the OP’s friend would argue are only “one word”.
ETA: I think you might be missing the question in the OP- not whether “alot” is valid as one word, but the definition the friend is using makes it one word (not a combination of two words).
On the one hand dictionaries do not proscribe rules; they reflect actual usage. OTOH a fraction of a population’s usage is not enough to raise a traditionally incorrect usage (typically viewed as a reflection of ignorance by others) into mainstream acceptable variance.
How much does a variant need to be used until it becomes acceptable rather than a reflection of ignorance? I’d say a lot. A alot is not enough.
A lot of people misspell “misspell” as “mispell” but “mispell” is still a misspelling.
And even though many write “loose” when they mean “lose” they’d still lose an argument that they were write (I mean right) because others make the same mistake; only someone with a screw loose would think otherwise.
I agree with a previous poster that the OP’s inquiry would be better served not by a poll about “a lot”, but rather by a Great Debate on “what is the best definition of the word ‘word’?”
For some everyday, practical purposes, defining “word” as “something, when written, your language happens to set off by spaces” is useful.
But when you dig into the grammar, semantics, and underlying reality of a language – and start to compare different languages – a different concept of “word” becomes more useful. By that definition, “a lot” is just an adverb, equivalent to “mucho” in Spanish (for example), or “beaucoup” in French. No English speaker “feels” its roots anymore (“a quantifiable amount, like a land parcel”), just like French speakers no longer feel “nice blow/hit”.
Colloquial Spanish does have an expression – “un monton” – which means “a pile/mountain” literally, but is used for “a lot” – but it hasn’t (yet) replaced “mucho”, so the “pileness” is still dimly “felt” by the speaker.
I suppose one could be surprised that the English expression still hasn’t fused into a single “word” (meaning, “collection of letters set off by spaces in the standard written language”), even after centuries of common use as a very common adverb.
French fused “beau” and “coup” a while ago.
I’ll bet it has something to do with the timing of the invention of the printing press. A lot of written conventions were more or less “set in stone” around that time. (Of course, “a lot” might still fuse someday.)
I just realized that one reason it hasn’t “fused” as a written convention, is because it is still parsed by English speakers as a divisible phrase: we can say “a whole lot”.
I wonder if an Oxford dictionary cite for this is “Page/Plant, 1969”
