atvsattaWhat's the difference?

Quick tell: at is a preposition, atta is a contraction, so they fill different roles in a sentence.

Which to use

“at” is a preposition and “atta” is a contraction - they look or sound alike but fill different roles in a sentence.

#21
“at” frequency rank
#29,174
“atta” frequency rank
29195
confusion score

Side-by-Side Comparison

Feature at atta
Definition In, near, or in the general vicinity of (a particular place). that's the; that's a

Letter map: at vs atta

Shared letters muted; letters that set at and atta apart highlighted. Shared run: 2.

2 ch
at
4 ch
atta

Role in the sentence - at and atta

Our dataset has no pronunciation recorded for both members, so the reliable separator here is grammatical: at is apreposition and attaacontraction. On the page they differ by 2 extra letter(s) - “at” sits inside “atta”. Our composite confusion score for this pair is 29195, derived from the frequency rank of both members and their visual similarity.

at is recorded at frequency rank #21, classified as aprep, pronounced /æt/. atta is at rank #29,174, tagged as acontraction.

Glosses for this pair are partially populated in our dataset, but the full side-by-side definitions above should still guide you to the right choice.

With a confusion score of 29195, this pair ranks #365,035 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs - roughly mid-pack for confusability.

Orthographic DNA of at vs atta

Shared letters: at. Private to "at": -. Private to "atta": -.

"at" · 2 letters · shape VC  ·  "atta" · 4 letters · shape VCCV

Known mistypes of this pair

Frequently Asked Questions

Do "at" and "atta" mean the same thing in a sentence?
No - they are not even the same part of speech. "at" is a preposition and "atta" a contraction, so a sentence built for one is usually ungrammatical with the other.
In ordinary English text, does "at" or "atta" show up more?
"at" is the more common of the two: it sits at frequency rank #21 in our English list, against #29,174 for "atta". That is a wide gap, so in ordinary text the rarer spelling is the one worth double-checking.

What to do next

You've compared "at" and "atta". Here's where to go from here.

  • Full dictionary entry for "at" with definition, IPA, and generated misspellings. Word entry
  • Full dictionary entry for "atta" - compare definitions side by side with the headword page. Word entry
  • This pair ranks #365,035 of 530,003 scored English confusable pairs in this corpus vintage. Corpus statistics
  • "at" and "atta" also get mixed up with nearby pairs, the highest-scored neighbour is "Asta vs atta". Nearby pair
  • Recorded mistypes exist for at least one side of this pair, useful when a spell-checker or OCR lands on the wrong form. See mistypes

Confusion rank #365,035 of 530,003 scored English pairs, corpus vintage 2026-09-03, not spelling advice.

Source: Wiktionary (via kaikki.org) Structured Wiktionary extract

Source: FrequencyWords open word-frequency list