atleast?

[Natalie Maynor]

Bethany Dumas wrote:

> Is anyone encountering the spelling "atleast" for "at least" in university
> classes or elsewhere? In particular, has anyone encountered invariant
> "atleast" from any writers (students or others)?

I don't think I've encountered atleast, but I've encountered inwhich.
When I see inwhich, I'm always reminded of Guy Bailey's story of asking
a student at Texas A&M why he spelled inwhich as one word (in a
sentence where the "in" was inappropriate anyway -- this was when Guy
and Michael Montgomery were collecting data for their "in which" paper
a number of years ago).  The student, supposedly a straight-A pre-med
student, replied that he hadn't been sure whether inwhich was one word
or two and hadn't been able to find it in the dictionary, so he did a
survey in his dorm and found that the majority of people thought it was
spelled as one word.
   --Natalie Maynor (maynor at ra.msstate.edu)