et al

/ɛt ˈæl/

The scholarly et al. means "and others." Say you’ve got an article written by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. You can take a scholarly shortcut and refer to them as "Crosby et al.."

The phrase is an abbreviation for the Latin et alii. You don't need a period after et, since that's the whole word, but you do need a period with al.. Something else you need to know is that you don't use a comma between the proper name and the abbreviation, just as you wouldn't use a comma if you were writing "Crosby and others." And one last thing: you don't usually italicize et al., even though it's Latin.

Definitions of et al

1. adverb

   and others ('et al.' is used as an abbreviation of `et alii' (masculine plural) or `et aliae' (feminine plural) or `et alia' (neuter plural) when referring to a number of people)
   “the data reported by Smith et al.”

   synonyms: et al., et alia, et aliae, et alii
2. adverb

   and elsewhere (used when referring to other occurrences in a text)
   synonyms: et al., et alibi