In the Spanish language, the expression at least or at least is used a lot, since it is a widely used expression with two different meanings.
The bad thing about this expression is that there are certain doubts about how the sentence is written, if it is written all together as one word, that is, at least, or if instead it is written separately as a sentence, that is, at least.
The bad thing about this is that there are many people who write the expression in different ways, since some write it all together and others write it separately. This can create confusion for readers, since when using this expression, they will not know when they are writing it correctly and when they are not.
That if, in the most elitist and educated circles they do know how to write the expression correctly. This means that if one day we have to interact with these people, we must at least know how to correctly write expressions like these in order to become part of their select club.
A person who writes with spelling mistakes is considered a useless person, with little intelligence and little culture, being excluded from all kinds of social gatherings or clubs. In addition, in Internet discussions, badly written phrases or paragraphs are not taken into account, since people will consider you uneducated just for that phrase.
In addition, writing well is very important for us editors, since it has been proven that Google penalizes articles with misspellings, placing them in the lower parts of the search results. On the other hand, well-written articles benefit and are therefore pushed to the top of Google search results.
For this reason, spelling the expression at least or at least correctly is important. Today I am going to show you which of the two ways is correct, since I tell you from here that there is only one correct way to write this word and not both as some people believe.
Instructions to write at least or at least
- Meaning of at least: The first thing we are going to do before saying exactly how all this is written is to explain the meaning of at least and at least separately, explaining which is correct and which is not. Let’s start with the sentence written separately, that is, at least. At least it is an expression collected by the royal academy of the Spanish language, that is, it is a completely correct meaning and a correct way of writing that can be used freely. It has two meanings, firstly, at least it is used in a context in which we want to explain that something exceptional has happened, such as “at least the kitten has been saved from the fire”, meaning something like “but at least less”, wanting to point out something different within something else. It is also used in sentences in which we want to try to convince someone to carry out a small action after they have denied us something, for example in the sentence “since you won’t let me go out at least leave me my cell phone”,
- Meaning of at least: Now that we know the meaning of at least, we go with the meaning of at least, that is, of the written word all together. I am sorry to inform you that if you were writing this sentence as a single word, you were doing it wrong, since at least it does not exist and it is not collected by the RAE, so it does not have any kind of meaning. This means that it is only a mistake that should not be said, since the correct meaning is, at least, everything separate, not everything together. Of course, I do not rule out that RAE ends up recognizing this sentence all together as correct, since it has done worse things, such as collecting words derived from pronunciation errors that, from my point of view, should not have been collected. In the year 2016 at the time of writing this, is incorrect, but this could change over the next few years.
- Trick to avoid confusion: We already know that the correct way to write this expression that tries to point out the lesser evil is “at least”, that is, separated. If you are one of the people who usually has spelling mistakes and usually writes the word all together because that is what the body asks for, I will tell you some tricks so that you never get confused again. First of all, think of at least as an expression and as a phrase, that is, as a set of words. When thinking of this as a sentence, we are going to remember that it is not only one word, but two, therefore, it is written separately. We are also going to analyze the word, being a union of al and minus, being al the link and minus the word that tries to indicate the lesser evil. The word at least doesn’t sound like less, it sounds like something that has nothing to do with it, like a battlement or something like that, so remember this so you never use the expression incorrectly again.