I had this discussion with my wife last night, and online dictionaries seemed to confirm that she was correct: "alot" is not a word.
Yet for some reason "a lot" looks strange to me when used as an adverb, as in "I run a lot" or "We go to the movies a lot". However, "I have a lot of friends" and "That looks like a lot of work" seem correct to me.
Am I completely wrong here or is there anything to the way I see this?
Even though it looks like 50% of adult, native English-speakers seem to think that it is, I'd say no. Maybe in 50 years it will be. Also, I guess it is singular. "A lot of cars IS black."
That and people who think you need an apostrophe to form a plural are the two surprises I've noticed since e-mail has exposed us to so much personal writing.
Regarding the use of plural verb after "a lot of":
A number of, A lot of, and a few of all belong to a group of expressions called partitives for countables. While the article a might make them appear singular, they represent a plural number of countable objects, and they take plural verb forms.
See an earlier post here.
Regarding the original question of the spelling of "a lot" vs. *"alot":
A lot of people use the spelling *alot, but it is not currently part of standard English either in its partitive use or in its adverbial use. While I do see it misspelled a lot, it is a lot better to write it as two words.
NOTE: My online search for *"see it alot" yeilds 69,700 hits; "see it a lot" yeilds 10,400,000. *"Alot better," 1,400,000; "a lot better" 62,300,000.
Glenn said:
Regarding the use of plural verb after "a lot of":
A number of, A lot of, and a few of all belong to a group of expressions called partitives for countables. While the article a might make them appear singular, they represent a plural number of countable objects, and they take plural verb forms.See an earlier post here.
Hmmm, interesting, but I'm not that the school teachers I had would buy that concept.
Would they buy what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say on the subject?
A number of
Although the expression 'a number' is strictly singular, the phrase 'a number of' is used with plural nouns (as what grammarians call a determiner). The verb should therefore be plural: 'A number of people are waiting for the bus'.
This is not the case with 'the number', which is still singular: 'The number of people here has increased since this morning.'
There are also countless guides that address this very point of partitives for countables.
U of Washington guide
So it would be:
A number of friends are coming to my party.
A lot of cars are black.
A few of the library books are damaged.