To a Frenchman, everything is a platitude that is not a paradox. The Bramleighs Of Bishop's Folly Charles James Lever A platitude that nobody has expressed and that nobody has acted on is a great truth. The Ghost in the White House Gerald Stanley Lee It is tolerated to-day for no other reason than that it has cornered the platitude market.
It is short for the Latin et alii ('and others'), which means and others.. For example, the phrase IBM, Microsoft, HP, et al. means IBM, Microsoft, HP and others or Carrâ¦uthers et al.- Carruthers and others.
One of these is the Latin phrase et al., an abbreviation meaning âand others.â It is used to shorten lists of author names in text citations to make repeated referencing shorter and simpler. Note that et al. is italicized in this post when I am using it as a linguistic example, but it should not be italicized when you are using it as part of a reference citation.