Into VS. In to

🚨The word “into” is a preposition that expresses movement of something toward or inside something else.

📌Take a look at the sentence, “Mary put her letter into the blue envelope”. Here, into shows that something has been placed inside of something else, i.e. the letter inside the blue envelope. This is why it’s spelled as one word.

🎟️More examples :

📎I made it into work a few minutes early today.

📎Don’t put new wine into old bottles.

📎The tooth fairy tucked the tooth into her pocket before placing a $1 bill under my daughter’s pillow.

🚨“In to,” on the other hand, is the adverb “in” followed by the preposition “to.” They aren’t really related and only happen to fall next to each other based on sentence construction.

📌Take a look at the sentence, “James dropped in to say hello”? Here, James isn’t going inside of something, and this is why in to are two words, not one. It’s also possible to rephrase this sentence and say, “James dropped in, in order to say hello”. If you can squish “in order” between “in” and “to”, then certainly you should spell them as two separate words.

🎟️More example :

📎My boss sat in to audit the meeting.

📎I just wanted to get in to see some free baseball.

📎The tooth fairy came in to collect my daughter’s tooth.

🚨One trick to help you decipher which word (or word pairing) is correct, is to think of it this way:

“Into” usually answers the question “Where ?” while “in to” is generally short for “in order to.” So look at your sentence and replace “into” or “in to” with “Where ?” If the second half of your sentence answers it, use “into.” If it doesn’t, replace “where” with “in order to.” If that works, use “in to.”

📌Here is this method put into practice:

📎The tooth fairy put my daughter’s tooth where ? Ah—into her pocket.

📎The tooth fairy came in where?

To collect my daughter’s tooth?

Hmm … that doesn’t work.

📎The tooth fairy came in order to collect my daughter’s tooth.