When do we use “adept in” and “adept at”?
In short popularity wise two uses can be discerned:
Adept at word ending in -ing; E.g. I am adept at answering.
Adept in the noun of whatever; E.g. I am adept in the art of answering.
A dive into the digitized google corpus reveals some patterns:
- adept in verb(ing) results in 5k hits
- adept at verb(ing) results in 55k hits
Therefore at is widely more common when followed by such a verb.
Adept in/at, followed by the noun of, the result is different.
- adept in the noun of results in 4.7k hits
- adept at the noun of results in meager 900 hits
After these two that are pretty clear I looked at adept at/in noun and here it gets murkier. On the first look at seems to be winning with 6.3k hits versus 2k hits for in. However a lot of those are nominalized verbs ending on -ing (7 out of the top 10). The other three are self as used in self-whatever (management, study...), problem in what looks to exclusively problem solving and finally mathematics. The last also claims the top three spot in the adept in search. That leaves 158 'at' vs 110 'in' for mathematics. Politics is 95 'at' to 66 'in'. Music however '137' in to just 50 'at'.
The only obvious pattern seems that noun or verb, if the word ends on -ing use adept at.
On a speculative note it might be shifting towards adept at noun, since a lot of entries in the adept in noun results are more obscure, old or fantasy based (alchemy, astrology, occult, sorcery, necromancy, woodcraft), they also seem more negative over all (deceit, crime, villainy, intrigue, politics ;)).