At

How to spell at

2 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce at

What does at mean?

1. prepositionUsed to indicate a particular place, time, or position.

At in a sentence

• The meeting starts at nine in the morning.

• They waited at the bus stop for nearly an hour.

Where does at come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This little word comes straight from Old English 'æt', a native Anglo-Saxon preposition meaning 'near', 'by', or 'in the place of'. It belongs to the older Germanic family of words and shares an ancestor with the Old Norse 'at' and the Gothic 'at', all carrying the same idea of nearness or location. Far back, this Germanic root is related to the Latin 'ad', meaning 'to' or 'towards', which is why the two look and feel so similar even though English did not borrow 'at' from Latin. The spelling has stayed remarkably stable for well over a thousand years, never picking up extra letters, which is why it remains one of the simplest words in the language. Its only modern quirk is the symbol '@', historically a shorthand for 'at the rate of' in commerce, which later became the heart of every email address.

How the word is built

• at (single morpheme; no prefix or suffix)