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What is the difference between the two? Both are used in practice.

Examples for 'in contact with':

  1. To be or to not be in contact with someone. (Macmillan Dictionary)
  2. ...until the palm was in contact with the ball. (The Engineering of Sport 7)
  3. ...both feet are in contact with the ground. (Gait Analysis in the Science of Rehabilitation)

I find that the standard definition of the idiom 'in contact' (as per TheFreeDictionary.com) do not always apply. It works for example 1 but not for examples 2 and 3.

Examples with 'at contact with':

  1. ...their attempts at contact with their European counterparts. (Petersburg)
  2. Bent elbow at contact with the ball... (Teaching Tennis: The Fundamentals of the Game)
  3. ...the landing phase begins at contact with the ground. (Excercise and Sport Science)

The target subjects for both sets of examples are the same in the respective order. All examples are taken from credible resources.

How does the usage differ? Or is it just a matter of preference?

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  • In the first of your second set of examples, at is syntactically tied to their attempts at [doing something], so it's not the same usage. Nor is the third example there (it begins at the time of contact). And so far as I'm concerned the second example is simply "wrong" (almost every native speaker would use in there, as with the first three examples).
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 16:34

1 Answer 1

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The difference has to do with their meaning

"at" - refers to a physical location
"in" - while it does refer to physical location in many cases, but with your usage, it is referring to a state of being

If you notice my bold and italicized words, that is an example of a state of being

A clear-cut example is:

He was in a coma

where coma is a state of being

A clear-cut example for your usage is:

They stayed in contact

or

They stayed in contact with each other

where "in contact with each other" is the state of being

I would try to define state of being better to you, but in English there is no way to define the word being, therefore state of being can not be defined. The only way to define it is to provide synonyms or explain it to you via examples.

A synonym to state of being would be state of existence or state of existing

Just Noticed Something:

In the phrase:

...their attempts at contact with their European counterparts.

technically "contact" is not a real physical location, but rather it refers to a symbolic location on the timeline. and the "place" on the timeline it refers to is the event involving "contact with their European counterparts."

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  • Do you mean to state the usage of the word 'at' is a subset of the usage of 'in'?
    – Ébe Isaac
    Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 7:20
  • I would put a good bet on it. Of course, the flaw of spoken languages (whatever language it maybe) is that they have some "lenient" rules, so there are bound to be (somewhere out there) an exception to your statement. However, to answer you simply, yes, it is
    – user189910
    Commented Sep 23, 2016 at 7:24

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