One of the most common mistakes in writing is using “alot” instead of “a lot,” as in “My car has been giving me alot of trouble.” There is no word “alot” in the English language. There is a word “allot,” but that means something quite different. Why do we see “alot,” but not “afew,” as in “Hand me afew nails”? It’s probably because there’s no word “affew” with which to confuse it.

Addendum: Oh my god. I typed “alot” (with quotation marks) into the Google search engine. I got 112,000,000 hits. That’s a lot of dumb people. (Sorry.)

Addendum 2: I found this in the search.