"e-mail" vs "email"

wiredog points us to a Wired article talking about a debate at least as critical as the race for U.S. president: e-mail vs email. Well? Which is it? Personally I'm too lazy to care about the proper use of homonyms, much less type an extra hyphen.

Comments

Post 1995 Uncertainty: proper nouns

[mr. fabulous]

you will eventually start to lose that portion of your readership which may be influential and have real decision-making powers.

Well, I can't argue with that. Shape up!

Since I'm here: In the end it is the folks that have seniority on the Network (nee, Arpanet) can decide this. However, note that the NYTimes has for years referred to it as "E-mail." Note the capital 'e'. I tried that convention for a while years ago, masochistically too mind you, especially to disassociate myself from the Win crowd. Who typically never pass up an opportunity to gratuitously mangle a phrase, much less a sentence.

I gather the assumption made by the Times is that as snail mail is orthographically denoted as "US mail," electronic mail therefore should be similarly constructed. Thus, transforming email into a proper noun they get Electronic mail or E-mail.

I would go with what old timers use or the Jargon File:

There are numerous spelling variants of this word. In Internet traffic up to 1995, `email' predominates, `e-mail' runs a not-too-distant second, and `E-mail' and `Email' are a distant third and fourth.

You'll notice the 1995 reference -- that's when the general unwashed media, corporate analysts, and the rest became aware of the Network. That gibes exactly with my experience. I'd go with "email." Less typos, less filling, tradition. =)

--
Me pican las bolas, man!
Thanks

Re:its pop-cubed-mail and smtp-mail

[kps]

"By 1977, the Arpanet employed several informal standards for the text messages (mail) sent among its host computers...."

Re:eh-mail

[carlos_benj]

Shouldn't that be mail-eh?

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[Ed Avis]

Also note Tom Christiansen's list Userspeak vs Hackerspeak. In particular:

C:\ -> root#
====
email -> mail
emails -> messages

Not that I'd consider tchrist's opinion definitive :-)

Re:Search engines will answer your question.

[red_dragon]

Of course, if you use Altavista's Advanced Search, you could add them up, as follows:

(email OR e-mail OR "e mail") AND anythingelse

Which is correct or which is used?

[Chacham]

I believe e-mail is correct. As it is a hyphenated word, it defines a new phenomena. As it comes into common use, however, it seems just plain silly, and people drop the dash. At that point the basic rule of language comes into play, basically, Language is defined by those who speak it. So, when e-mail becomes common, the dash may be dropped as it is now a word and no longer a hyphenated. Or so it would seem.

Re:A note on email versus e-mail

[vslashg]

I type e-mail just because it reads better; "email" looks like it just might be pronounced "EHM ail", but I have nothing against someone using "email". I know what it means when I see it, and communication's the main reason for language in the first place, right?

But saving keystrokes as a reason? Ech. That's like arguing :) is better than :-) because noses waste bandwidth. I mean, we'd save keystrokes too if we stopped typing 90% of our vowels. Yu undrstnd wht ths means, rght? Ths s savng kystrks to, bt I dbt it wld ctch on...

Let's choose both

[Senior Frac]

Since we geeks are going to rule the world eventually anyway. Let's just mandate a regexp solution to appease everyone...

e-?mail

--

Re:email

[pallex]

Some people still refer to a phone as a `phone. As if there`s any other sort of phone (monophone? Uniphone?)

Re:More importantly: email is a PLURAL NOUN

[ralmeida]

What bugs the hell out of me is the all-too-common usage of 'email' as a singular noun. I see all the time people saying 'I'll send him an email' or 'I have 3 emails'.

I see this all the time here in Brazil, but for a different word: software. "Software" is used here for the same as "application", so everyone says/writes "I used two softwares for this", or "Which softwares did you use", etc. I've seen it used correctly once in my whole life. You see it in newspapers and even computer magazines -- and the worst: if you write correctly, people will say you've written it wrong. Aaaargh!

Back on what you said, perhaps people should use "e-message" or "e-letter". This way they could say "oh, I'll check my e-mail because my friend sent me an e-letter yesterday".

(or "oh, I'll check my email because my friend sent me an eletter yesterday".)

We could even have "epostcard", "epicture"... hmmm, is this a new way to get rich? :)

--

Re:Is this really necessary?

[BilldaCat]

I totally agree.

I submit:
2000-10-23 13:55:04 Nader set to play spoiler (articles,news) (rejected)

after Slashdot asks for articles about candidates other than Gore. But I get rejected for e-mail/email.

That'll be my last Slashdot submission.

BTW, the link to that Nader article is http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A583 18-2000Oct22.html. Talks about him taking votes away from Gore and giving states to Bush, and how the Gore camp is mega-pissed.

Rules of phonetics

[Gallowglass]

If you spell it 'email', then according to the rules of phonetics, you would pronounce it "ehmayl" (short e). But if you spell it 'e-mail', then, because it is separated, the 'e' is pronounced as a long vowel; thus, "eemayl".

(And please don't complain to me about all the English words that don't follow the rules of phonetics. English is a mongrel language, and some older words bring the phonetics of their source language with them. New words should however follow the phonetic rules so we have a reasonable chance of pronouncing them correctly when we first come across them.)

Unfortunately, school boards in Canada and the US (and for all I know in Great Britain and Oz too) still refuse to teach phonetics it seems, so I'm not surprised to see these tempest-in-a-teacup debates arising now and then.

Now if we could only get the community to discern the difference between "lose" and "loose"!

All I have to say is.....

[Forrestina]

Deep...... Man..... Whoa....

-------

Echo-mail

[RiffRafff]

I always thought that the original source of email (or e-mail, if you prefer) stemmed from the term "echo mail," not "electronic mail."

Re:Echo-mail

[RiffRafff]

I'm the character-study for Sid on User-Friendly!

Re:Echo-mail

[T-Ranger]

Your a old time fidonet guy aren't you?

Re:More importantly: email is a PLURAL NOUN

[mdtrent3]

In theory, yes, the word should be used the same way that "mail" is because it's another variation of that word.

HOWEVER, how many new words and rules have surfaced because of new technology rapidly coming into mainstream use?

The general population uses this word as a singular, and it's not like it's a centuries-old word that is suddenly being grossly distorted.
Personally, i think whether you use the dash or not or if you use it as a singular noun or not, it shouldn't be THAT big of an issue.

It's still all relatively new language that is evolving in the English language every day.
Maybe they'll end up being technically incorrect (like "i'm going to send my friend an email") but how many 'rules' are there in the english language that don't have exceptions?

"e-mail" - noun, "email" - verb

[grov]

e.g.

I read an interesting piece of e-mail today.

I'll email you my reply later.

This works for me.

Here's the answer

[SpacePunk]

If you really want to screw with em call it either i-mail or imail.

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[VSc]

Not to mention other pains associated with typing email addresses in general. For instance, in finnish layout (which i have), dot, comma and dash are on the bottom row on the right. So, i have to reach *back* for all these much needed characters (also in URLs). Guess how many times was it www-comma-something? And guess how easy it is to always figure out what went wrong? :-)

Another joy of finnish layout: the @ sign is an AltGr character on "2" key. So, to type an email address, beside name, i have to reach for an invisible dot (well, my hit rate rises however :-) and do the one-of-a-kind Ctrl + Alt + 2 trick to get the @-sign. That's worse than typing "database".

__________________________________________

smilies (was :Re:email)

[BlaisePascal]

True, I can see smileys replacing full stops. But how do smilies interact with parethesis?

Is it proper to go "(this is a joke :-) )" or is "(this is a joke :-)" sufficient?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Re:smilies (was :Re:email)

[flatpack]

I did use to use "(this is a joke :))" before, but then I decided it was far to ugly and looked like a really fat bloke with extra chins was smiling and so I now just use "(this is a joke :)" which would probably confuse grammar checkers, but looks cleaner...

Re:smilies (was :Re:email)

[Happosai]

I usually put "(this is a joke :)", and occasionally I'll use "(this is no joke ):"! I always put the terminating punctuation before a smiley. ;) However, I have a tendency to overuse ellipses, so it usually looks okay...:)

[Happosai]

Re:smilies (was :Re:email)

[Jonathan the Nerd]

Is it proper to go "(this is a joke :-) )" or is "(this is a joke :-)" sufficient?

I've always used (this is a joke :-)). Since the closing parenthesis in the smiley is part of a multicharacter symbol, it doesn't function as a closing parenthesis, so you need another closing parenthesis to close the open one.

(You'd think they'd teach us useful stuff like that in English class, but no, we had to study gerunds and participles.)

Screw it...

[AntiPasto]

it's mail.

----

Re:Screw it...

[Chiasmus_]

That was a very, very insightful post.

...FOR ME TO POOP ON!

Re:Screw it...

[yuri benjamin]

Yup, when I log in to my computer, I get a message that says "You have new mail".

To read it, I type "mail" at the shell prompt.
I have never had to use the letter 'e' for this.

Re:Screw it...

[plague3106]

One, who cares, and two, the article didn't mention the gov't considering this at all. It was a 3 page article on a desicion they made internally as to the style of thier articles. Now i'm left why this article was even published, let alone posted on slashdot.

e-what?

[tfxx]

they want my e-feedback
well, i e-screw them
how does that feel
no seriously, i dont care

It's email.

[taliver]

It's a common word now, and it wasn't electronic-mail to begin with.

Re:It's email.

[MidnightLog]

I'm working on a programming project that uses the term "email" quite often in the documentation. I started off using "e-mail", but I found that the descriptions in my Visio diagrams would have line breaks after the dash, like this: e-
mail.
Since that looks like hell, I switched everything to "email".

Re:It's email.

[Peter Putzer]

T-shirt: uh, isn't it named that way because it fucking LOOKS like a capital "T"? so a lower-case "t" would be somewhat beside the point, wouldn't it?

Re:It's email.

[Junior J. Junior III]

If we followed the nearest equivalents, atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb, we would write E-mail like A-bomb. Or T-shirt, which isn't an abbreviation, and must be written with a capital, because they don't look like a lower-case 't'.

Actually, it's tee shirt. You only write T-shirt or Tshirt or whatever if you're lazy, abbreviating, or writing shorthand.

If you want to live under the delusion that English grammar has a consistent logical structure, you can go ahead and make arguments for e'mail, as some poster suggested. I kindof (oops, not a real word) like the way "e'mail" looks, but I know that it ain't (oops, not a real word) gonna (ditto [um, ditto again]) happen.

In reality though, natural languages don't have hard and fast rules, and they evolve according to how they are used by their speakers. Both email and e-mail have been in usage and ought to both be recognized as legitimate. I think e-mail "looks" better from a typographic standpoint, but I have a personal bias against typing hyphens when I don't absolutely have to, so I generally prefer to use email when I'm writing because it's faster and easier.

Some /. (is this the correct spelling for "slashdot"?) user has a quote attributed to Andrew Jackson that it's a "damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word". Or something like that. I like that quote.

It's your language; there's no click-wrap agreement saying that you have to agree to use it a certain way or that you can't modify it as you wish. Hack your language! Master your language; don't let your language master you.

There's a really good book by a gentleman named John McWhorter entitled The Word On The Street which anyone who cares a whit about language they speak ought to read.

P.S. Obviously, kindof, ain't, gonna, and ditto are real words, despite what any grammarian prescriptivist would like people to think.

Re:It's email.

[hyperizer]

ObPedant: Of course, it should probably be "e'mail" if we're being picky about it...

I can see your reasoning, but I can't think of a single noun in the English language that has an apostrophe in it.

Re:It's email.

[Stalemate]

Yeah, just like "data-base" huh?


--

Re:It's email.

[bulgroz0]

I think the future e-president will e-empower the masses thru e-commerce and e-management. Welcome to the e-government! It is not email or e-mail; just mail!

Re:It's email.

[atrowe]

In the future, moron, please don't post to this forum unless you have some inkling what you are talking about.

T-shirt is a shortened version of the original (and correct) spelling: Tee shirt. This term first appeared in Europe in the late 1860's to describe a fashionable new golfing attire that consisted of shortened sleeves. Hence the word Tee shirt.

Re:It's email.

[Lisendral]

ObPedant: Of course, it should probably be "e'mail" if we're being picky about it...

Why not eMail... Since it seems we're living in an eCommerce, iMac world now...

--Lise
Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. Those who can do neither grow up to be president.

Re:It's email.

[Peter Putzer]

Oh, and the golfing "tee" isn't named after the shape, is it? :-)

Re:It's email.

[Tet]

It's a common word now, and it wasn't electronic-mail to begin with.

Precisely. It was never "electronic-mail", although it was once "electronic mail". Wired News, according to the article, didn't even appear until 1996. I'd already been using email (without a hyphen) for nearly a decade by then. A brief look at history would have told them that it was only marketing departments that ever used e-mail. The rest of us were quite happily communicating using email...

ObPedant: Of course, it should probably be "e'mail" if we're being picky about it...

Re:It's email.

[SquidBoy]

You are right, it was not "electronic-mail" but that is not the point. When two words are combined like that, a hyphen must be inserted, thus the term "e-mail".

Sorry, Mr Webster, but you don't get to write the rules. There is no 'must' in language, only custom.

If we followed the nearest equivalents, atomic bomb and hydrogen bomb, we would write E-mail like A-bomb. Or T-shirt, which isn't an abbreviation, and must be written with a capital, because they don't look like a lower-case 't'.

The fact is, there is no precedent for 'e-mail' or 'email'. So just do what the hell you like.

hmm...

[jesser]

Hotmail is "The World's FREE Web-Based E-mail". AOL also advertises e-mail. Amazon mentions e-mail. The RIAA website will not send you spam e-mail.

my.netscape.com advertises email. Mozilla mostly uses email. Slashdot uses email in prefs.

Therefore, the correct spelling is "email".

--

Re:Actually, E-mail

[Jonn Carnnack]

The English language has lately tended towards economy (minimalism) in the realm of punctuation, whereas previously it tended towards pedanticism.

It's a common trend to see hyphenation drop out of words as time goes by. If it isn't "email" now, you can rest assured it soon will be.

A quick glance at business letters will reveal other trends. Full stops and commas are often left off the end of lines now. For example:

23rd October, 2000

Dear Mr. Smith,

Hi there!

23 October 2000

Dear Mr Smith

Hi there!

Re:Is this really necessary?

[mooredav]

This morning I start up my browser and see an article which is asking how to spell a word??????? Come on, guys.

It's all about the omellete.

British vs. American English

[jawtheshark]

Oh, I did not know that :-) You learn something everyday.

Re:email

[brunns]

> a fundamental part of society.

What do you mean part of society? Email is society.

Daft...

[manichawk]

This is just another case of pot-ay-to pot-ah-to...
Basically, sheer pedanticism at its worst. After all, who really cares about extra hyphens these days? It's like putting dots into your T.L.A.s - pointless :o)

Re:Daft...

[carlos_benj]

This is just another case of pot-ay-to pot-ah-to...
Basically, sheer pedanticism at its worst.

Shouldn't that be 'po-TAY-to' and 'po-TAH-to' (as long as we don't think we can get any more pedantic)?

related article

[drfalken]

check out this related article. I think, therefore that we should conserve as many characters as possible. It's like people named Matt or Elliott who use 2 't's - I mean that's pretty frickin' gready. Wouldn't it sound the same with just 1 't'? Why are you people hoarding?

Reference

[VSc]

Oh, and that's http://sunburn.stanford.edu/~knuth /em ail.html

__________________________________________

I was right! I was right!

[Croaker]

I was an editor in a past life for a software company. We picked e-mail, much for the saem reasons mentioned in the article. It's a combination of two words, which calls out for a hyphen. That one of the words is abbreviated is irrelevant, in this case.

I also think that e-mail makes for an obvious pronunciation. How would you pronounce "email" if you've never heard it before? Probably "em-ale." As editors, we needed to consider not only the current useage of native speakers, but also how comprehensible it will be to those who speak English as a second language. Following the rules helps, since most non-native speaks of English operate on rules (such as they are). Deviating from them in the name of style is just stupid.

I'm glad to see that Wired is finally getting a clue about this. When our ediorial group reviewed our standards, we took a look at the Wired guide. We ran away holding our noses. This was around '96, where we had a huge boom in Internet-related jargon (i.e. capitalize "Web" when talking about the World Wide Web? "web site" or "website"? etc.)

Anyhow, I won't follow Wired on anything after seeing the design of their first issue. Jesus, it looked like it was typeset by a myopic color-blind monkey. They've backed away from that, from what I can see as well (I haven't looked at an issue in 5 years or so).

Some rules and made to be broken (especially in writing). But other times, breaking the rules is just stupid.

Note that this really only applies to people who actually do writing for a living. As far as e-mail (or email), and Slashdot posts, heck, if the reader can understand it, who cares? It's only us nitpicky pro writers who really care about this stuff anyhow.

all summed up

[psin psycle]

In this thread If you don't want this to happen to you:

I program and read a quantity of enamel

then go with e-mail.

Semantic Inversion

[Force]

Of course, we should be calling our ëmail "mail", and our snail mail "S-mail" (or should it be "smail"?)

[Reminiscent of the dog/hound inversion that happened in (Old? Middle?) English: "hound" was the generic term, "dog" was a specific type of "hound".]

We need a story on its vs. it's

[chrissam]

I think the /. community would benefit more from a story on the misuse of "it's" as a possessive...

But I suppose one should only embark upon one revolution at a time :-)

--

The most telling point ...

[Scurrilous Knave]

The definitive point is made by Wired themselves, on the third "page" of the article. They note that they are making this change "despite conventional wisdom". Sorry, guys, conventional wisdom is the language, in the case of languages like English without a Central Authority. Donald Knuth is right, Wired is wrong--it's "email".

Obvious answer to the dilemma.

[dr_labrat]

Why not just "mail"

I thought that the terms email and/or e-mail were redundant.

We should use the term "tree-mail" to refer to paper based mail systems. Much less confusing.

Bias

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

But Google covers not only English text. Should the usage of other languages influence the English one (Maybe).
"email" is an ordinary French and German word.

Though if the difference is 20 to 1...
__

Re:its just mail

[desdemona]

I don't know about in the States, but the prevalence of SMS (Short Message Service)-capable mobiles in the UK has led to the 'verbing' of the noun 'message', e.g. 'Could you message me his number please?' or 'I'll message you when I get on the train'.

Re:Mail...

[esonik]

You are right! The correct term is "mail". Try this:
man email
man e-mail
man mail
See ? Also, saying "mail" instead of "email" or even "e-mail" saves one/two bytes every time you mention it.

Re:What the...?

[Gendou]

monkies.c:1: parse error before `{'
monkies.c:2: confused by earlier errors, bailing out

Pssst...you're missing a close paren.

Re:Search engines will answer your question.

[Flabio]

The proper way to spell a word is the way most people spell it.

If that were the case, "a lot" would be spelled "alot" or "allot". *Shudder*

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[f5426]

You are not kind to the readers here.

The citation is from the page:

<http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email .html>

The page is about why he don't have any email. To quote the start of the page:

"I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address"

And yet, he used email longer than most of us. Respect, people, respect...

Cheers,

--fred

How email became singular

[falser]

You bring up a good point but...

When referring to a single piece of "mail" most people use the word "letter". For example "I checked my mail and had 3 letters".

There is no email equivalent of "letters". I suppose the word "messages" would describe a single piece of email, but I don't believe it is used by anyone because "messages" is too vague a word and doesn't specify that it was a piece of email.

Therefore email became a singular.

I have to stop reading Slashdot and see how many emails I have waiting....

"I can only show you Linux... you're the one who has to read the man pages."

From the AP Stylebook and Libel Manual:

[pschmied]

e-mail Short form of electronic mail. Many e-mail or Internet addresses use symbols such as the at symbol (@), or the tilde (~) that cannot be transmitted correctly in some member computing systems. When needed, spell them out and provide an explanatory editor's note.

Unfortunately this is not the very latest edition of the stylebook. Anyone know if this has changed in this year's copy?

-Peter

Re:Just 2 versions?

[DamnOne]

I think i'm the only one who uses e.mail

It's MAIL.

[komet]

Email is rapidly becoming the norm, so I would say it ought to be called MAIL - just like other words which became supplanted by their own successors:

Electronic computer -> computer

Horseless carriage -> car

Digital calculator -> calculator

Wrist-watch -> watch

etc.

Re:It's MAIL.

[Eck]

Absolutely!

My problem with calling it "email" (apart from it looking like the German word for enamel) is mostly that it doesn't follow English pronunciation conventions. With "e-mail" it's obvious you're s'posed to say "e" and then "mail" -- but with "email" it looks to me like you're meant to say "em" and "ail" (which is close to how the German word is pronounced, come to that).

Re:It's MAIL.

[po_boy]

it ought to be called MAIL

I used to do that, until I was working in a network operations center and I needed a customer to mail me some logs of a secuirity problem he was having *right then* so I could grap the IP addresses out of them. When I told him to mail them to me, he asked if he could just email them to me.

I told him that was a very good idea and I gave him my email address.

I still believe it should be called mail, but there are some people out there that won't know what you're talking about.

whocares vs. who-cares

[AugstWest]

Ah, grammarians, how thee dost not fit the realm of technology.

We had a PR person totally filibuster a design meeting she'd managed to weasel her way into, arguing that we couldn't capitalize the options in a menu (like Older Stuff or Privacy or Awards off on the left of this page).

Now, I was a Lit/Creative Writing major, and I've got a strong grammatical background coming into tech, and there are a bazillion times that I see stupid debates like this -- spell it the way you want to, let Strunk and White battle it out later.

(OT)In K5, each article can have its own poll

[yerricde]

Kuro5hin runs on the Scoop engine. Each posted article seems to have its own poll, if I'm not mistaken.

Oxford English Dictionary says "email"

[Fzz]

My 1993 edition of the Shorter OED contains "email":

email: n. Also e-mail. [ABBREV] = electronic mail

I think if the OED thought that email was acceptable way back in 1993, then it definitely should have become acceptable today.

-Fzz

epost or E-post?

[Pseudonymus Bosch]

Why not epost or E-post?
__

Let Altavista be the judge, not Webster!

[rogerwong]

According to my word search on Altavista,

email: 59305232
e-mail: 66829950

So there you have it. "E-mail" wins by a small margin, but "email" is catching up. People are lazy. Eventually, everyone will drop the hyphen.

Re:MLA Website

[Deluge]

anyone have a copy of the Guide to reference?.

My copy of the Guide says "Don't Panic" in large, friendly letters on the cover.

---

Re:email

[Refrag]

It's not email! That's just stupid. If you spell e-mail as email it would be pronounced something like...

Em Ale

Now, that doesn't sound like electronic-mail, it sounds like some lame microbrew that they'd sell on ThinkGeek.


Refrag

Re:More importantly: email is a PLURAL NOUN

[LordSaxman]

'squid' is singular, but it's also plural. 'squids' is proper plural too. 'email' behaves the same way in common usage, so deal with it.

Losing hyphens

[L Fitzgerald Sjoberg]

One point here: "e-mail" isn't two words joined by a hyphen, it's a word and a letter joined by a hyphen. On those grounds, I'll start typing "email" when we also have the words "xray" and "uturn".

Re:Ironic

[Ouroboro]

Actually the link at the end of the article is Email. I would imagine that it is due to the fact that the word email appears at the beginning of a sentence.

What about..

[BlueHexahedron]

It should be E. Mail, the 'E' being an abbreviation. I think email is a French word or part of a French word, or something. E-Mail is probably the most preferred spelling.

I disagree

[Tiroth]

I am a fairly quick typist but my brain is still much faster than my fingers, so when I am attempting to convey a complex thought typing speed does come into play.

Definately. (counter-example)

[yerricde]

The proper way to spell a word is the way most people spell it.

<irony>Definately.</irony>

Just because people misspell it 10% of the time doesn't mean it's correct.

Re:Definately. (counter-example)

[SlippyToad]

But it will be. Come back in 100 years and there is a chance (a 10% chance?) that it will be. The point is that usage dictates form, not the other way around.

Re:Definately. (counter-example)

[DeadSea]

At least even if I can't spell, I get my links correct. It seems that correct and misspelt are the same in the above post. :-P

from google:
definitely - 2,590,000 pages
definately - 238,000 pages
definetly - 45,900 pages
definitly - 41,400 pages
definatly - 33,300 pages
definetely - 18,700 pages
defenitely - 3,870 pages
defenitly - 1,850 pages
defenetly - 1,210 pages
defenately - 628 pages
defenatly - 536 pages
defenetely - 181 pages

I defenatly like 'defenetely' the best. We defenatly need to get more people using it.

(I guess most people do know how to spell that one. I was hoping more people had trouble with it and I wouldn't look so bad. I always use it and I can never spell it. But then again spelling was my worst subject in grade school. (Now I post to slashdot, I wonder if there is a correlation))

I think my trouble with 'definitely' stems from the root word. I always think it define - ately when I put them together. I think maybe I should be thinking de - finite -ly. It doesn't make as much logical sense, but at least I'd get the word right.

Ask Oxford...

[cperciva]

The Oxford English Dictionary lists it as "email".

Good enough for me.

I just call it mail

[edlinger]

I don't really refer to it as email (and I never wrote it "e-mail"), I just call it mail. It may not be right, but that's just how I refer to it.

For instance:
"I'll mail it over to you."
"Don't bug me, I've got to finish going through my mail."
"Look, if you didn't mail it to me, I have no record of it, so it won't get done."

The frame of reference usually gives away what kind of mail I'm reading.

Re:What the...?

[Bobby Orr]

YES it absolutely is worthy. At my company, we recently made a banner to be displayed on a booth for all to see at a convention.

The question of Email vs email vs e-mail took too much of our time. I didn't have a good answer for my boss when he posed the question. I never thought to ask /. but i am glad someone else did!

Timely

[rjamestaylor]

I'm so glad this has been brought to our attention. This problem (the proper use of or avoidance of hyphens in coined words) sorely needs a solution! We must dedicate our anal and pedantic efforts to fix such crises.

Once we've solved this problem we can move on to alot versus a lot and perhaps decide if its a sofa or a couch. Is it Chicken-fried Steak or Southern Fried Steak? It's or its? Then/than?

The world is waiting. They are depending on us--heck, they've handed the whole responsibility of this nightmare to the Nerds of the Net, opting to focus on simple problems like Israeli-Palestinian conflict, opening up of North Korea, the largest Ebola outbreak to date, genetically-engineered corn reaching human food markets and other trivial minutia.

Darn, I'm proud of geekdom!

Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers

Re:Timely

[rjamestaylor]

Substantial improvements! ;-)

Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers

Re:Timely

[Powerdog]

Some style corrections:

The world is waiting. They are depending on us--heck, they've handed the whole responsibility of this nightmare to the Nerds of the Net, opting to focus on simple problems like IsraeliPalestinian-conflict, opening up of NorthKorea, the largest e-bola outbreak to date, geneticallyengineered corn reaching human-foodmarkets and other trivial minutia.

Re:And

[Baba Abhui]

Beware, Slashdot denizens! There is an impostor among you! Yes, that's right: Bob Abooey is an impostor! I am the One True Baba Abhui!

Language butchering and nit-picking...

[joshuaos]

Despite popular slashdot opinion, I think this is a good article, and something worth bringing up, but I am a very nit-picky person when it comes to things like this.

I personally use mostly 'email', but often 'e-mail' as well if I happen to feel the desire. I never capitalize the 'e'. I'd like to mention as well that IMHO, people on the internet (especially young AOLers and script kiddies) seem to think that just because you're typing something on a computer, in an email, IRC, usenet, or something to that effect, that they simply don't have to bother with pesky things like sentances or punctuation or captilization. This bothers me. Is gramar any less important to getting your ideas across because the medium you're writing it on is a digital one?

Joshua

Punctuation

[Raven15]

From the article:

<I>Besides, the "e" means electronic, and a principal function of the hyphen is to join two words to form a completely new word. In this case, "electronic" and "mail." Ergo, e-mail.</I>

If they're worried about proper English usage, doesn't this mean they should be switching to "e'mail"?

------
Tried to save myself but myself keeps slipping

Practice what you preach...

[Happosai]

A pretty tedious three page article about the fact that they've chosen to use 'e-mail' rather than 'email' (which is the same as I have always done), and there are links at the top and bottom of the article's pages saying 'Email'...d'oh!

[Happosai]

Voice from the past...

[LauraLolly]

I can't say it any better than Peter Neumann did some years ago, in his Hyphen-hater's handbook.

elocution e-locution Peculiar expression that results from use of spelling and grammar checkers
email e-mail Electronic mail [Distinguishing itself from every other term on this list, the unhyphenated version has no natural meaning whatever, but spelling checkers might suggest Emile or Ismail.]
emend e-mend To make a hex or binary patch
emerge e-merge To combine different input streams

There is a lot more, and it's all funny. If you don't know who Peter Neumann is, go to his page, and learn about the guy who has been talking about security risks since before you were born, and has been doing it well.

I agree with Don - let's use email now!

[rombouts]

Hi - although I am a pedant and try to obsessively follow stylistic rules, I can foresee that the hyphen wil disappear eventually, so let's just get rid of it now and save the world a few billion keystrokes per year.

TWR

Homophones, homonyms, and a side of Taco

[Q*bert]

Personally I'm too lazy to care about the proper use of homonyms

Apparently you're also too lazy to care about the meaning of homonym. A homonym is a word that is written exactly like another word, but has a different meaning, e.g. wind (the noun), which looks just like wind (the verb). For what it's worth, a homophone is a word that sounds exactly like another word, but has a different meaning, e.g. bear versus bare.

email and e-mail are neither homophones nor homonyms. :)

Sorry, I can't resist a little pedantry in the morning...

Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

Re:Homophones, homonyms, and a side of Taco

[kupolu]

He wasn't talking about email, he was talking about his use of homonyms, just as an example. Read the context before you flame him.

Re:Why?

[jchunter]

The standards matter and the principles of good English matter because without a set standard for this sort of thing, communication breaks down rather hopelessly.

Considering, tho, that "email" seems to be the accepted usage (someone above commented that it was what was used by those who thought it a proper word already) I think by trying to foist the hyphen into their writings that Wired is doing more to harm their supposed cause rather than help it.

--Jo Hunter

Re:email

[Happosai]

Microphone
Francophone
Dictaphone

[Happosai]

And slashdot has reached a new low...

[Phokus]

'nuff said, mod me down all you want , you know it's true. Talk about trivial.

Re:Mail mail everywhere

[Evil Grinn]

p-mail - that which comes by letter carrier

Or Pegasus Mail.

Think this is a problem?

[Trevlig]

In Sweden they [as in newspapers and various losers] write it as you pronounce it in Swedish. The result is Mejl contra Mail. The samething goes with Site that becomes Sajt. I think its horrible use and it looks disgusting considering that I was online and using those words long before newspapers catched up on the jargong.

To me its of no importance if you write:

*email
*e-mail
*mail

But when you change letters around for easy pronounciation [misspelled on purpose or something ;-] its another league.

Let the words be written as they where intended. And since e-mail/email is now considered as mail why not simply write mail as writers above me stated.

Well just dont moderate me as offtopic because i take this on a international level. We have more serious problems then just the '-' sign here in Sweden =)

I will have my way on this issue in Sweden and i will never surrender the true words of origin. mail is mail no matter how you write it with a e or not. But i will never change my spelling on it!!!

And how come there isnt a product called "send-e-mail" ;-) It sends mail dammit!

Re:Is "anal-retentive"...

[dazedNconfuzed]

"Offtopic"? "Flamebait"? Not at all! The question is whether it's "email" or "e-mail", which is just like asking if it's "anal retentive" or "anal-retentive"...and is just as silly.

Apparently some moderators have no sense of using satire as a perfectly valid way of making a legitimate point...

Re:email

[beebware]

Microphone? Telephone? Phonetics? Just off the top of my head. :)
Richy C.
--

Re:MLA Website

[Vermifax]

The MLA (which everyone but journalists and writers believe is total crap) can say what ever it wants to. Dictionaries often list both as acceptable, use whatever you like.

Vermifax

What about pronunciation?

[RiotXIX]

A hyphen can be used to infer a short pause: email puts emphasis on the 'mail' of email (rather than the 'e'), which doesn't work.

Its mail these days...

[DaRelliK]

I dunno about everyone else but I get a lot more useful mail via my computer :o

Punctuation? I don't think so...

[leipold]

It's amusing to see people who don't know the difference between "its" and "it's" arguing about the correctness of someone else's punctuation! And some of them, who always put an extra apostrophe in the possessive "its", justify it by saying they're too lazy to type the hyphen in "e-mail"! C'mon, folks...

Ursa Minor Beta?

[corvi42]

Something about Wired magazine over the last few years ( in fact almost since its beginning ) has me convinced they are none other than the branch offices on this planet of that most successful of books, you guessed it the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy.

On Ursa Minor Beta, as you will all no doubt recall, the HHGTTG had its offices, and in fact they created an entirely artificial universe in their offices so that they could do field research in the day, and not miss all the great parties that happened in the evenings.

"damn clever of course, but its got nothing to do with the real galaxy, has it?"

Anyone get the impression that someone over at Wired had a few too many goofballs and decided they should do the same thing? How many times have I read material that sounded like some journalist who's entire education in technology consisted of misquoted marshal mcluhan, neuromancer and microserfs blabbing on about the dijerati or some other completely wired-created buzzword designed to impress the warehouse loft crowd and nobody else. When was the last time I read a wired article that DIDN'T sound like that? 1996?

Who actually thinks that wired's design advice has anything to do with anything other than something they invented to make themselves feel like their avant-garde.

Re:Ironic

[CharlieG]

"incongruity between the actual result of a sequence of events and the normal or expected result "

When you make a big deal about setting a standard, the expected result is that you will follow the standard. Sounds Ironic to me!

Re:email

[mrzaph0d]

i can't remember which, but there was some MS product that didn't have "microsoft" in it's spell checker...

"Leave the gun, take the canoli."

Ambiguity is the big deal

[IanWestray]

The main reason you have standards of usage in any language is to prevent misunderstandings. (Anyone who's ever read the journals of Lewis and Clark could tell you that. "Creative" spellings that could be any one of three words take much longer to read through.)

It'd be e-mail in my style guide.

Tons of other potential words are gonna screw you up when you set the marketing types to adding "e" in front of everything. You want to "evote"? Victims of SPAM would be "evictims"? I find that really "eevocative"? You could see any of those confusing readers who didn't know whether "evote" might be some other word they just didn't know. "E-vote," to anyone who's ever heard the term "e-mail," makes immediate sense.

And thanks to all those folks who logged on just to complain about this thread. You're just too cool, and that fact that you posted something on this thread to prove it only makes you more impressive. (Hope I never have to edit your code, in which you name the same variables three different ways.)

hmm..

[talks_to_birds]

tomatoe

tomato

potatoe

potato

e-mail

email

Let's call the whole thing off.

t_t_b
--
I think not; therefore I ain't®

Re:"Monetize"?

[Col. Klink (retired)]

> Anyhow, what does "monetize" mean?

"To establish legal tender." Putting all that funny green ink on a piece of paper makes that paper "worth" something. It could also be used to describe converting gov't securities into currency (which can then be used to by real goods and services).

Many nations have "monetized" their debt. That is to say, they simply started printing money to pay off their debts (resulting in tremendous inflation).

It seems like monetize is being adopted as the latest buzz word. I think they think it means "to convert into money." Press Releases that fete that they are "monetizing" their assets mean that either they are going to sell the assets or use them to make something that will, eventualy, make money.

If a company is going to "monetize their mission-critical implementation with bleeding-edge, next-generation functionality and leverage their position," I'd guess that they are going to sell a new piece of software and hope to make profit.

Re:Your Sig (OT)

[PiEquals3]

Scene: A small kitchen in suburban America. A teenage girl sits at the table studying a Physics text. Her mother appears to be cooking.

Mother: "Honey, do you like antipasto? I thought I'd make some -- maybe mix it in with the pasto, and see how it turns out."

Girl: "Sure, mom. Sounds good."

The girl seems slightly uncomfortable, but doesn't know why. Suddenly, she begins flipping madly through the textbook until she finds what she's looking for. As she reads, her eyes grow into the size of Buick hubcaps. For one fatal moment, she's frozen.

[Slow-mo action sequence: Girl knocks her chair back and leaps toward her mother, who is blithely opening a package. The girl's mouth slowly forms the word "No-o-o-o-o.." as she flies through the air.]

Cut to helicopter's-eye view of the house. Birds chirp. Horns honk. Suddenly, the house becomes a huge plume of smoke and a shockwave that levels trees, buildings, and vehicles for miles around. The mushroom cloud forms, gracefully as always. There is naught but silence disturbed only by the timid crackling of citywide fires.

Announcer: "People don't kill people; violent transmutation of matter into raw light and energy kills people. We at the Coalition of Concerned Citizens against Food Physics Ignorance have a better way. Join now, and fight Food Physics Ignorance -- [a scream puncuates the silence. A school bus explodes] -- before it's too late."

--

Does it really matter

[Nezalhualixtlan]

e-mail or email: the hyphen is just extra, and doesn't really add any meaning to the word now. So for the sake of efficiency, there is no reason to use the hyphen, grammar be damned...

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[Mr. Slippery]

Try typing the word email ...

Irrelevant. Questions of spelling, grammar, and usage cannot be resolved by appeal to typing speed! I can just imagine Will Shakespeare considering the words in Hamlet's famous soliloquy as a function of the time to scribe them with an ink quill...

Unless you're a secretary, typing pre-made text, the time to actually think of what to say should dwarf the keyboarding time. Assuming, of course, that you actually have something worthwhile to write.

As much as it pains me to disagree with the Great and Powerful Knuth, "email" just doesn't reflect the pronuciation of the word; anyone who hadn't encountered it before would probably read it as "EM-ale". (Hmm, sounds like a brand of beer. Free free to use it to name your next batch of homebrew or microbrew, just send me a case.) Yes, it's true that spelling often has little to do with pronunciation (which is why I suck at it), but past ambiguities are no excuse for creating new ones. So I'll stick with "e-mail".

You have to move that pinky finger (if you type in standard position, which i don't, but for the sake of argument, lets say i do)

I think strong arguments can be made for abandoning the standard typing position, given the fact that my keyboard has a large set of keys never considered by the inventors of QWERTY.

both wrong!

[Hepkat]

If I were to make an educated guess on the proper writing of that term I would probably choose e'mail. This makes entirely more sense in reference to the rest of the english language. ..but then again, the english language has hardly ever made sense before, why should it start now?

Re:The difinitive answer?

[GlassUser]

e'mail would not work as a contraction. Contractions follow the style of using the complete first word and than adding an apostrophe and a contracted form of the last word. Therefore electronic'l would be a more correct contracted form.

What about o'clock? ("The time is six o'clock"). I believe that stands for "Of the clock".

Usage in the UK

[4D.uk]

The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years

I am English and live in England, and was not aware of that, however FWIW my dictionary of British English lists both forms equally.

I therefore choose the shorter of the two (after all, how could I disagree with a writer-of-big-textbooks?)

Re:The difinitive answer?

[FPhlyer]

Well.

I gave up reading the article after the first page. Wired really tires me out with it's constant use of buzzwords like "Digirati" and the like.

Yes, maybe I should have finished the article before posting my comment. As far as "Wired Style" goes, maybe I was wrong. I got that book for Christmas a few years back when I was still working as a Journalist with the U.S. Navy.

This is the kind of article on slashdot where very few people are actually going to take the time to read the article. Personal opinions on this matter are more important then what Wired says about it anyway.

However, because this is true, I should have made doubly sure to be factually acurate in my comment. I went by memory (because my copy of 'Wired Style' is 40 miles away and hidden among a stack of hundreds of books in the top of my bedroom closet.

Actually, I have wanted for a while to get a new copy of the "Associated Press Stylebook". I haven't seen a copy since the 1994 edition and I would like to see how it has delt with many of the terms that have become so popular due to the internet over the last few years.

e'mail would not work as a contraction. Contractions follow the style of using the complete first word and than adding an apostrophe and a contracted form of the last word. Therefore electronic'l would be a more correct contracted form.

"E-mail" works. I prefer email and I prefer it as a new word. We are on the virge of a new emerging evolution of the English language. English has always been an evolving language, a language that changes to meet the needs of the people who are speeking it. This is why there are so many differences in proper English, Austrailian English, American English and the various dialects (southern English is definately different from Northern.)

Read a copy of "Beowulf" in the original tongue. Old English is barely recognizable to us today. Then read a few passages from the King James Bible of 1611. The language of the "King's English" is also remote to us (though easy to interpret.) Now read a copy of "Grapes of Wrath" and you will see that even this book, which is less than 100 years old, uses language that at times seems a bit odd. Now read "Snowcrash" and you will be reading something that seems modern to us.

It won't be long before our language accepts the new terminology into it's vernacular as new words and not contractions of two seperate words. E-mail will become email. And little children who see the book "Charlotte's Web" sitting on the shelf will assume first that it is a book about technology.

Yes, I prefer 'email'. it is simpler. Almost elegant. It is forward-looking. E-mail makes you think of a letter sent electronically. But email is word that is open and transcends the old concepts of mail.

My vote is "3-m41l"

[franksbiyatch]

I am so l33t it hurts. www.ridiculopathy.com

Re:Email started in 1996???

[jesser]

There ain't no official RULES for the English language, despite the claims of third-grade English teachers, except "COMMON USAGE."

I'd like to see an article from a major newspaper that uses the word "like" for, like, every part of speech.

--

Re:Mail mail everywhere

[Mr. Slippery]

v-mail - does anyone still own an answering machine?

What, I should trust C & P ^H^H^H^H^HBell Atlantic^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HVerizon with my messages? Yeah, sure.

Re:its pop-cubed-mail and smtp-mail

[beebware]

For me, it's SMTP and IMAP mail then, with a little bit of POP3. If only I could remember what RFC822 states...
Richy C.
--

It's been mail for a long time!

[TA]

It's 'mail', not 'e-main' or 'email' or any other braindead 'e'-thing. What's the 'e' got to do with it? Why not 'o' for 'optical'? Most of the mail transport these days is optical anyway, or will be very soon. And after that? What when the final transport to your brain goes via neuronic material, do you still want to call it 'e'-mail? Rubbish. It's "mail" and it's been "mail" for the last twenty years, at least among hackers and Unix people. The other, road-based version is called "snail mail".
TA

Re:Both terms are wrong.

[mfarah]

So, is that SPAM or S-PAM?

Re:"Monetize"?

[Honclfibr]

What can I say? We're a tech school. If the word has more than 2 syllables, and it's not "capacitor", who needs it? :)

who gives a rat's @$$ about the hyphen?

[cecil36]

IMHO, I could care less how email (or e-mail) is spelled. I tend to use the hyphen, but I would not raise an argument over ASCII character 45 being inserted in between characters 101 and 109. To me, the debate would be a waste of bandwith that could be better used for Quake.

More importantly: email is a PLURAL NOUN

[bee]

What bugs the hell out of me is the all-too-common usage of 'email' as a singular noun. I see all the time people saying 'I'll send him an email' or 'I have 3 emails'.

Yuck yuck yuck yuck yuck. The noun 'email' is plural, and should be used exactly the same way as the plural noun 'mail'. You check your email, you send a piece of email, you send some email if you insist on a shorter way of saying the previous. This used to be standard usage before about 1993 or so (see Sep tem ber that never ended), but sadly seems to be the minority usage now.

---

Re:More importantly: email is a PLURAL NOUN

[rabidcow]

don't forget it's a verb, too.

"to email me, shove your hand in a blender and gargle prune juice"

Re:More importantly: email is a PLURAL NOUN

[Phroggy]

Works like "hair". A single hair, several hairs, a clump of hair. So, having a lot of e-mail, and reading one e-mail, are both fine.

E-mail is also a verb; you can e-mail someone.

And whoever said something about uncountable nouns was right. Same as hair, though; can be either uncountable or singular (or with an s, plural).

--

Re:More importantly: email is a PLURAL NOUN

[Ed Avis]

You send some mail, or you send three messages.

Anti 'e-mail' campaign!

[mledford]

I say we revolt! It's never happened in mass to a web site and I would like to see them go back to email. So I call upon everyone who cares and even those who don't to not visit and write the editor at and tell them you won't visit until the change it back. Let's be more than leeches and passive people in a digital society. Let them know that we make technology and set the terms for our creations. Let's not be bound by editors and others!

Boycott Wired News! :-)

2015 Dictionary

[Throw Away Account]

email (ee'-male), n. obs. mail.

fedex (fed-ex'), n. package transported by Federal Express, United Parcel Serivce, or similar courier.

mail (male), n. 1) An electronic message. 2) obs. A fedex sent by the old U.S. Post Office.

Re:my friends mom

[Nailer]

In laymans terms:

Prozac causes the brain to be unable to break down serotonin. There's a build up over time.

Ecstacy causes the brain to produce more serotonin than it needs.

Dancing for 8 hours [as either one is likely to cause] without bothering to drink water, overdosing, or being `allergic' to the drug is likely to happen in either case. But getting bad pills is much more likely to occur via e.

Which is why I'm seeing an awful lot of people using Prozac over miotsubishi.

Re:e- mail

[axioun]

How 'bout we don't? e-mail takes longer to write (especially for me because i have to go looking for most keys that aren't letters, such as "-"). Speaking of electrons, think about how many of those little guys would be saved if everytime the word "e-mail" was typed and/or transmitted on a network the hyphen was omited. Less electron usage = less energy = less fossil fuel usage = cleaner environment. I think we all want a cleaner environment, don't we?

doesn't anyone care about the environment?

[axioun]

not using hyphen everytime one types e-mail = less energy usage = less fossil fuel usage = cleaner environment. don't we all want a cleaner environment?

According to the A-and-P ....

[The Llama King]

The Associated Press Stylebook, the style guide used by most U.S. newspapers and news organizations, says it's "e-mail." I suspect this is because it's a combination of two words. Newspaper people and English majors love to use that hyphen when combining two words into one.

Having learned long ago you don't argue with a copy editor armed with the AP Stylebook (particularly when he/she is on deadline), I'll go with e-mail.

You should, too.

--

email

[Pentagram]

Email is written e-mail by those that don't consider it a proper word. Email is used by those who consider it already a fundamental part of society.

My prediction is that we stop pronouncing it 'E'-mail and start calling it 'emmail' because it's quicker to say.

---

Re:email

[Tower]

But you never capitalize email (or e-mail) even when it occurs at the beginning of a sentence - you know, one of those 'rare' exceptions in English 8^)

... it seems slower to me to pronounce it 'emmail' than 'ee-mail'... I tried it a few times each way - sounds like too much peanut butter stuck to the roof of the mouth... got some funny looks, too.
--

Re:email

[Alanzilla]

and can't forget xylophone! (even if i can't spell it)

I'm a xylophobe. The striking of metal bars to make music notes is terrifying to me.

Re:email

[Cuthalion]

My prediction is that we stop pronouncing it 'E'-mail and start calling it 'emmail' because it's quicker to say.

"long" vowels in english aren't actually longer than "short" vowels. Those terms are merely left over from a time in which it was. Phoneticists actually use the respective terms "tense" and "lax" these days instead. If you destress a syllable then it WILL be shorter, but that's not all that relevant.

Also, if you wanted to use the lax vowel corresponding to the sound in email it would be immail, which people do say fairly often, although you have to intercept the sounds before they get turned into english by your brain to notice. (I'd say that people don't say immail instead of email because it's shorter, but because it's easier, which is a more compelling phonological reason anyways.)

Re:email

[m2t]

and can't forget xylophone! (even if i can't spell it)

Re:email

[atrowe]

That's funny, I ran it through a few spell checkers and it came up capitalized whenever I put it at the beginning of a sentence. All but one didn't seem to care if it was spelled email or e-mail. Lotus notes seemed to think email was wrong. It's not a very good program though.

Re:email

[Chan]

Star Office "corrected" email to read e-mail...

Re:email

[ranessin]

I consider e-mail to be a proper word... Remember, there are other (although not many) proper words out there that are hyphenated.

Ranessin

Re:email

[Tower]

Lotus notes didn't recognize 'Internet' in my notes before I added it, either...
--

Re:email

[oojah]

I write email because I prefer how it looks to e-mail.

The E is capitalised at the start of a sentance regardless of what somebody else said in reply to you :)

The one I like is whether to use full stops after typing in urls and email addresses. Go here http://this.is/a_real_site. - that wouldn't work properly in plenty of email clients. It's the same with smileys. If you add a smiley, it can be a full stop replacement :)

oojah

Re:email

[pallex]

Hmmm. I`m sure there are people who, upon hearing `you can `phone us on xxxx` record it on dictaphone and send it to their postal address.

Had a mate who worked in a motorbike shop, got a phone call from a guy who`d been told to send in a stamped, self addressed envelope if he wanted a price list. He was complaining that it arrived, but when he opened it there was nothing inside!

Mostly OT...

[cr0sh]

Actually, it should be LASER (or, more correctly, L.A.S.E.R.), which stands for Light Amplification by Stimulated Emmision of Radiation...

I support the EFF - do you?

homonym

[BobandMax]

Rob misused the word "homonym" in this context. A homonym is one in which the words are spelled and pronounced alike, but have different meanings. He should have used "homophone," in which words have different spellings and meanings, but are pronounced alike.

Knowing this will not improve his writing.

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

Webster and "E-mail" (was Re:It's email.)

[jdunlevy]

I work at a publication that bases its style on Webster's CollegiateDictionary, which -- funny enough -- does have it as "E-mail." Take a look at the entry at Merriam-Webster OnLine.
While editors may regard Webster as the final authority, I don't necessarily, especially on words like this (surely it was used before 1982?), but for the sake of consistency, an authority like this can be helpful.

God, details, etc.

[surrogatedrone]

It is an interesting article, especially since at the advertising agency I work for the corporate guidelines call for "email." It's also worth noting that a majority of our clients (Fortune 500 types, both old school brick and mortar and the dot coms) require the non-hyphenated, uncapitalized spelling as well.

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[M-G]

You're not alone. I hate seeing/hearing "an e(-)mail".

Re:Why?

[lpontiac]

Except "email" is clearly understood by pretty much everyone. You'd actually expect Americans to understand, what with their "color" and all...

Delimiters and punctuation for computer commands

[Tassach]

For URLs and email addresses, or anything else where english punctuation could be confused with computer punctuation, I use angle brackets as delimiters (eg &lthttp://this.is/a_real_site&gt.) This parses much more cleanly, IMHO; and most email clients will recognize the url without munging it. I think it makes cutting and pasting easier as well. YMMV.

For smilies in paranthetical statements, I use square brackets or curley braces as outer delimiters to avoid confusion. An extra trailing space before the closing delimiter helps too. [like this :-) ] Avoiding ambiguity is a good thing.

Both are correct

[yist]

The jargon file seems to prefer "email" however.

Re:my friends mom

[ralphclark]

E is dangerous. Lots of people have died in various ways as a direct result of taking it. Ditto heroin, crack and LSD. You don't want to believe that so you always pretend it was something else that killed them. This is called denial. Wake up to reality, boy: drugs are dumb.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

@nal spelling is for the clinically 31337

[corvi42]

I think this is an important issue facing us all, because I've got e-commerce and i-culture stuffed so far up my @$$ I need a full duplex enema.
Further more the Web is a proper noun and should always be capitalized, and all you trekkies should just stop splitting your infinitives, ok? It's "to go boldly" not "to boldly go" !

Does anyone need any further evidence that wired magazine is about as in touch with computer culture as a micro manager with a copy of microsurfs.

"Look at me everybody, I'm writing about pop culture, aren't I hip and cool, don't you want to network with me in starbucks? I'm a wired writer and I need attention dammit ! Look at me !"

Re:Knuth says it's "email".

[vslashg]

Makes sense. After all, he's one of the nation's leading linguists.

eMail

[active8or]

Everybody know it is Electronic mail delivery subsystem.

seriousely, in programming style I alwasy write eMail. (=


- Knut S.

Re:my friends mom

[ralphclark]

That website is objective? What exactly is your definition of objective, then? Oh I see - it means that it reflects *your* opinions.

The posters on that site are nothing but a bunch of sad wasters.

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Donning asbestos jumpsuit....

[DrRight]

...sounds like a contraction to me... E'Mail? It's email. Like it.

What the...?

[Gendou]

Personally, I think the correct answer is c-neal.

Come on... Was this REALLY worthy of a /. news post? Yes, it's geeky... Yes, it's news for nerds, but is this "Stuff that matters?"

Re:What the...?

[garethwi]

if ('News for Nerds.' && 'Stuff that matters.')
{
post_worthy = undef;
}
else
{
post_worthy = 1;
}

Re:What the...?

[Andrewkov]

Hahahaha, I bet most everyone spotted that missed paranthesis immediately. This is Slashdot after all!

Re:What the...?

[Anonymous Coward]

But later on, it is:

if(entertainsMonkeys(post) {
Post(post);
} else {
Free(post);
}

Re:my friends mom

[Croatian Sensation]

Amazing!

Even after reading the article, you leave out the apostrophe in friend's.

The Vanishing Hyphen (Paging Agent Mulder)

[ackthpt]

I've read reprints from the 20's and 30's and it once was common to write these words this way: to-day, to-night, to-morrow. Considering it's one less character to remember and type it reinforces the philisophy that laziness it the mother of efficiency.

As for my vote, I always write email.


--

one good point though

[oblique]

"Standards do matter. The principles of good English are always relevant." This is for damn sure. There's no excuse for being lazy because "it's just an email." However, 'despite conventional wisdom that "new terms often start as two words, then become hyphenated, and eventually end up as one word..."' I thought this was already the case with email, and that is has already been accepted as one word. The OED lists it as such (sorry for the UTF8): emailâ? (Ë^iË?meÉl). Computing. Also e-mail. l. Colloq. shortening of electronic mail s.v. electronic a. 3. ... oblique

Re:Standard english rules

[Mr. Slippery]

Thus 'typesetting' probably began as 'type setting', and then moved to 'type-setting', and finally became 'typesetting.'

The path for 'email' was 'electronic mail', 'electronic-mail', 'e-mail', and finally 'email'.

Except that your "email" path has an extra step where "electronic" is reduced to "e-", thus destroying the parallel. Your argument might be valid if "e" were a word; of course, a lot of marketroids and hype-masters seem to want to move it in that direction.

my friends mom

[siokaos]

My friends mom calls it "e"

"I got a ton of "E" today...
You rollin?

Re:my friends mom

[James Nolan]

Sorry about your friend. Could you give some details? I've never heard of anyone dying from E. I've heard of people dying from dehydration, herion they thought was E, or any death near a rave (ecstacy related death...) etc. The problem is that the press misrepresents what actually happens in order to 'spread the word' that E is dangerous. I think E IS dangerous, which is why people ought to have accurate and detailed information, not propaganda.

So I urge you to share some details with us.

Re:my friends mom

[the_tsi]

Hey, guys,

I laughed hard at the joke. I'm not some uptight easily-offended baby like a lot of /. readers out there. I just want to make a little rant here, of a slightly personal nature:

<Rant>
Ecstasy is dangerous shit.

Besides the immediate side effects (dehydration, high blood pressure, etc), E has a lot of long-term effects that have not been studied in any depth. Some serotonin receptors in your brain are damaged every time you use it -- they're overloaded by the sudden release of serotonin and just give up. Yeah, everyone knows about "terrible tuesdays" and the recovery time after you come down from E, but sometimes it can take weeks for your brain to re-manufacture more serotonin.

Do some reading: http://come.to/ecstasy. I urge you. My best friend died this summer during his third experience with ecstasy. He was a computer geek studying biomedical engineering... slashdot material. The people that are hurt by this stuff aren't people you don't know in clubs far away -- they're you and me and our friends.

Party safely.

</rant>

-Chris

Re:my friends mom

[siokaos]

That's cool, I dont actually use E but It's just funny when she says that... btw: for a kickass objective site on drugs, etc. Vaults of Erowid.

46+2 baybe

Re:my friends mom

[elbobo]

a friend of mine died in a car accident a year ago. i still drive to the beach every weekend.

not to belittle your friend's death, but everything in life has its risks. and some of the things we do most often are some of the riskiest, but that doesn't mean we have to stop doing them.

Re:my friends mom

[elbobo]

wake up to reality boy, you just provided an emotive and factless post.

most recreational drugs, taken in sensible doses are no more dangerous than prescription medicines. the danger comes in being unaware of what you've purchased, what it's beeen cut with, or what is an appropriate dosage.

people will always take drugs, and the trend is increasing, not decreasing. safety lies in education and regulation.

Re:my friends mom

[Mr_SpICEz]

just as a side note
heroin, crack and E do not go into the same category as LSD.

Re:my friends mom

[markmelvin]

Got a ton of "E" from school??
Quit playing around.
STUDY HARDER !!!!!!

Re:my friends mom

[siokaos]

Objective, as in, it doesn't sway one way or another by a bias. It simply provides a great resource for people wanting to expand their mind.

Re:my friends mom

[jackherer]

You rollin?

yes. ;))

e:mail

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that :Cue :Cat rules the world, it's been officially changed to e:mail. So there should be no more confusion.

Oh wait, I suppose it could be :email... (fade into bickering)

Anonymous Kev

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[Forager]

Well, isn't it interesting the dynamic of it? Try typing the word email ... note how smoothly your fingers can reach all of those keys, no tricks or majour jumps involved for the fingers. Now try e-mail. You have to move that pinky finger (if you type in standard position, which i don't, but for the sake of argument, lets say i do) all the way up there and get it back into place by the time you reach that final "l" you've got to be really fast. In the small scale this might not seem like much, but in the great big picture, think of how much time is wasted on that single extra "-".

forager

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[po_boy]

...nonce words that consist of an abbreviation hypenated onto a word. ...Some very clear examples include A-bomb, H-bomb, X-ray...

What's the X stand for in X-ray (or even in X ray)?
(In case it doesn't stand for anything, I'm not trying to be a sarcastic, nitpicking dick. I just can't find it anywhere (and I looked) ).

Re:Is this really necessary?

[Reality Master 101]

Or maybe that article is not all that interesting? I mean, that's not exactly news. I think Slashdot is looking for more insightful articles that give information about the candidates, not about the election process.

In other words, that article tells you nothing new about Nader, Gore or Bush.

--

Both terms are wrong.

[billcopc]

Not e-mail nor email, nowadays it's all SPAM.

Re:Both terms are wrong.

[Alanzilla]

So, is that SPAM or S-PAM?

Ah, but is that significantly different from C-SPAN?

Source of Question

[Liza]

Allison Bechdel used this in a Dykes To Watch Out For calendar a few years back, and was approached with a request to sell t-shirts that asked, "Is there a hyphen in "anal-retentive"?"

The real reason to use the hyphen...

[rhea]

The real reason to use the hyphen in e-mail is so that you can sound like the esteemed publisher of The Onion:

"It has been brought to my attention that I should advise my tallow-headed readership on the importance of occupying the voting-stalls in the coming months."

--rea, who calls it 'mail'. (The paper stuff is called 'bills'.)

Email is an English word

[Alcoholist]

I think email has been in common use long enough to qualify as an English word in it's own right. I think it has risen above the existence of a mere compound non-word. Therefore it should be written "email" and not "e-mail".

But if you ask people who care about spelling...

[jesser]

spelling "e mail" - 374,000 pages.

- 370,000 pages.

spe lling email - 275,000 pages (quotes matter???)

spelling email "e mail" - 125,000 pages, the first ten of which have "e-mail" in their titles, except for the eighth.

--

Formal -vs- Casual

[mr.fonEtIks]

This is really an argument between formal and casual writing.

When writing a non-trade specific article or research paper, one should spell words out (i.e. "electronic mail"). You may indicate an abbreviation immediately after the first instance the word is used:

...electronic mail (e-mail)...

You may use whatever spelling you want when writing to friends or colleagues as long as they know what you mean!

Aural vs Visual, Novel vs Quaint

[James Nolan]

I used to like e-mail. It was new and tech related. You could tell: it had acronym-like properties, emphasizing just how NEW this thing was... kinda like R.A.D.A.R. Tech words sometimes use hyphens and periods in their construction, often a mishmash of jargon from the tech they relate to, to show how they were constructed.

But once people start using the word in conversation, you quickly forget what it looks like. And the tech itself loses its novelty, so eye catching hyphens seem quaint. Gradually, you write it the way you hear it; the aural representation takes over from the visual. Its a real word now. Like 'radar'.

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[po_boy]

On another note, I've started to notice people saying things like "send me an email". This always makes me cringe. "Send me email", or "send me an email message" are both fine, but "an email" is just plain wrong. Does this annoy anyone else, or shall I just crawl back under my rock?

I personally have been rooting for "email me", but "send me an email" is fine with me, even though it has superfluous words, because it indicates that the other party should email me once, not repeatedly or regularly.

The best poll in a while: it's

[Dr. Spork]

a) email
b) e-mail
c) eMail
d) E-mail
e) Emmett

Re:Your Sig (OT)

[setec]

I feel compelled to give props to the homie. That, my friend, was the funniest thing I've ever read on /.
Kudos to you, and kudos to your mother.

================

What does this do to the rest of them

[jbrooks]

ecommerce or e-commerce?

ebusiness or e-business

blah, this isn't news. tell me when the world has decided to drop the "e" altogether. THAT will be news.

Re:Search engines will answer your question.

[po_boy]

If that were the case, "a lot" would be spelled "alot" or "allot". *Shudder*

You have a point their.

Ahh.. good point

[Plasmic]

Which leads us to:

CPAN or C-PAN?

Actually, E-mail

[javac]

Believe it or not,
I remeber being corrected on an English paper when email was still new. My teacher corrected my email to E-mail. I am guessing that was the first established standard.

I prefer email though

Re:Actually, E-mail

[gfxguy]

That was way back in the seventies, then?
----------

When in doubt, revert to phonetics...

[Symbiosis]

Well, here's my theory: spell it like it sounds :-) The meaning thereof is simple. As with most people, I say the "e" and the "mail" separately, so therefore, it seems logical to me to spell it "e-mail". It is not pronounced ehmale, is it? So why spell it "email" as though it were one continuous word? Well, that's what I think, at least... :-)

---
On second thought, let's not go to Camelot, it's a silly place.

Its spelled email ...

[OakTree]

Remember folks, its spelled e-m-a-i-l but its pronounced s-p-a-m ...

Email vs. E-mail : Not the issue!

[Crystalus]

There's a much deeper message in the article, folks. Do you think the masses really care which way email is spelled? I think Wired is trying to separate quality writing from writing by the masses in the digital age. Look at the two following quotes.

"It was no longer necessary to know your semicolon, or your syntax, from a hole in the ground."

"Simply put, clear writing -- that which you understand easily -- is good. Writing that stops you cold, or forces you to go back and re-read what you've just read, is bad."

I think Wired is appalled at the atrocities Joe Shmoe has done to the English language. I totally agree. It starts with email, and now instant messages, where 30 year olds write like 10 year olds. Not capitalizing because of style is one matter, but doing it because someone is too lazy to reach an extra inch is abominable.

It's e'mail.

[afniv]

Okay, how about e'mail.

It's = It is
can't = cannot
could've = could have
e'mail = electronic mail

Hmmm. Why the hyphen?

Actually, I do usually write it as e-mail. Simply because I pronouce it "e" "mail" and not "em" "ail".

~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"

nope...

[psergiu]

The question is wether to be called e!mail or e:mail ... :)

--

Just to be a wise_ass

[Toblin]

It's e_mail

So much for "stuff that matters"

[HEbGb]

Must have been a tremendously slow news day. You're fading fast, slashdot.

Re:The difinitive answer?

[FPhlyer]

It's not that I can't spell definitive, it's just that I didn't spell it correctly.
Yes. You get a +1 for Irony.
:-)

There is no such thing as correct

[AgentOBorg]

Language is artificial anyway. Is it "check" or "cheque"? Or is it "nine," "neun," "nove," or "nona"? Is it it "hacker" or "h4kr"?

A long as people understand what your saying, its correct.

Re:There is no such thing as correct

[Chris Hind]

Sure: but if you use "e-mail" people will understand that you're a marketroid; "check" and Merkin; "neun" and immigrant; "h4kr" and lamer. Language, speeling; punctuation and the grammar say an awful lot more than you're giving them credit for: after all, this isn't C!

Re:Search engines will answer your question.

[Alanzilla]

If that were the case, "a lot" would be spelled "alot" or "allot". *Shudder*

You have a point their.

Your getting you're spellings all confused.

FSF recommendation:

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU/email

Mail...

[Oztun]

When I'm talking to people and I say I received mail from someone they assume I mean email e-mail. I vote for mail, my second choice would have to be email.

Re:Mail...

[psychosis]

Agree! When referring to the postage-stamp variety of message traffic, I always find myself specifically noting that it's snail mail.

Re:Mail...

[jawtheshark]

If vote for 'mail' too, but that probably is related to the fact that I'm not a native english speaker. I use the english word 'mail' to indicate email and use my native language word for snailmail. Native english speakers don't have that luxury of course.
I already heard reports of native english speakers who got confused if you say "send it by mail", where you assumed that mail == email.

E-this, E-that

[No-op]

I personally call it email, because I view it as just another word that gets used daily. that hyphen would be an extra character to type. no thanks.

For that matter, I really get sick of things with the e- prefix; so while email predates all these stupid e-things, why feed the fire more...

I suppose however that if you are a publication that makes it's money off annoying people with your trendy representations of the wired world, then you probably *SHOULD* use "e-mail".

Re:Search engines will answer your question.

[siokaos]

Try e -mail
=)

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[markt4]

While what Mr. Knuth says is true in general for nonce words, it does not hold in all cases. The most frequent exception is nonce words that consist of an abbreviation hypenated onto a word. Remeber that the "e" in e-mail is an abbreviation for electronic, and not a full word by itself. Some very clear examples include A-bomb, H-bomb, X-ray, and the less radiation intensive A-frame (although in this last case the "A" is not an abbreviation, but simply the letter A itself, refering to the shape of the construction).

Would Knuth (or /.'ers) claim by extention that these should be abomb, hbomb (How would you pronounce that one?), xray and aframe. I say we should stick with the established standard, although I will concede that "e-mail" with a lower case "e" has become widely enough used that "E-mail" with an upper case "E" is probably unnecessary.

Re:Your Sig (OT)

[Earlybird]

Of course, there's no food called "pasto". There is pasta, plural form pasti. That's probably what you meant. Why ruin an otherwise good joke?

The Webster version

[Earlybird]

Main Entry: E-mail
Pronunciation: 'E-"mAl
Function: noun
Date: 1982
1 : a means or system for transmitting messages electronically (as between terminals linked by telephone lines or microwave relays)
2 : a message sent electronically <sent him an E-mail>
- e-mail verb
- e-mailer /-"mA-l&r/ noun

http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=e-mail

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[Fred Ferrigno]

For me, I have all my computers set up to switch between Dvorak and Qwerty at the press of a hot key. Granted, you can't do that on every system you use, but I use my own computers the most and for others I don't mind typing in Qwerty.

And anyway, if we were to abandon Qwerty, then that's it. It'd be gone; games would have to be compatible with its replacement; and every system you used would support that replacement.

--

Re:Your Sig (OT)

[yuri benjamin]

Pasto is an archaic masculine form of the feminine noun Pasta, from a corrupt pronunciation of "Pass the spaghetti, please".

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[divec]

What's the X stand for in X-ray (or even in X ray)?

Nothing. This is a use of "X" to mean "unknown" (as they were not understood when the name was coined).

In case it doesn't stand for anything, I'm not trying to be a sarcastic, nitpicking dick.

Aw, that's the most endearing disclaimer I've heard for ages :-) remind me to buy you a drink sometime.

Who will this article influence?

[psychosis]

Although I agree with the article on a grammatical level, those of us who (as another poster noted) have accepted electronic mail as a given - almost a lifeblood - will still stick to our (BF?) guns and use whatever spelling we want. When I send messages to friends, I seldom use any keys but numbers, letters, and a few punctuation marks like commas and periods (i.e. no capital letters, no hypens, etc.) It's just faster to type and get your thought into electrons.
I dunno... if you want to spell it "eee-mail", I realld don't care. As long as "eee-mail" and "e-mail" and "email" all speak SMTP, it don't make no difference to me!!!

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[Zagadka]

X is often used as a short-form for "trans". For instance:

"x-former" = transformer
"x-istor" = transistor

So an X-ray is a "trans-ray", or a "ray that can go through things".

(Okay, I admit, I just made that up. Let's see how long it takes for this to become "common knowledge"... heh heh)

Re:All I know is... [way, way OT]

[Tower]

give it a rest - it wasn't intentional (and even if it was, he missed him by a good measure).

--

Re:Search engines will answer your question.

[cliveholloway]

And AltaVista Said:

word count: email: 59,305,232; email: 66,829,950

So it looks like email has it (just) with 53% of the 'market'

Obligatory Microsoft Bash

[DragonHawk]

Dear Mr. Coward,

You recently used the word "email" in a post on the Slash Dot Web Site. This message is legal notification that our client, Microsoft Corporation, owns the trademark, copyright, and patent on the word "email", and you are in violation of their Intellectual Property rights.

Normally, we would send you a cease and desist letter, or simply send Rocky and Guido out to your house to make some, ahem, personal rearrangements. However, Microsoft Corporation has been kind enough to allow you full license to use "email", provided you use the new name: Microsoft(TM)(R)(C) ActiveMail(TM)(R)(C).

We thank you for your expected cooperation in this matter.

Mr. Phat Bastad,
Junior Partner,
Dewy, Cheatum, and Howe, Attorneys at Law.

To Hot-Wired:

[gardenprimitive]

To whom it may concern,

To paraphrase a statement in the article: The word "e-mail" certainly evolved because some programmer was either too lazy or too ignorant to correctly type "electronic mail" in the first place.

Now that I communicate more by keyboard than by spoken word I am all for the elimination of any and all superfluous keystrokes. The meanings of "email" and "e-mail" are equally apparent. The sheer decrease in worker efficiency due to Wired News' adoption of this policy should be cause for lament by shareholders the world over.

I have, unfortunately, been forced to lower myself and include a number of extra keystrokes in the e-mail, for fear you may be unable to understand. Including hyphens, quotes, italics and capitalization I have made at least 29 unnecessary keystrokes. You have received this communication 29 keystrokes later than you otherwise would have.

Re:Search engines will answer your question.

[Fred Ferrigno]

"A lot" can't become "alot" simply because having the division serves a useful purpose. "A lot" isn't a word but two; connecting them would remove the article "a" and render any sentence gibberish.

"You have a (noun)," makes sense; "you have (noun)," does not. It would take quite a bit of grammar work to accept "alot," not mention a new form of noun that doesn't require an article. (Don't try to suggest that it become an adjective, unless you want to say "damn you've got alot RAM.")

--

E'mail

[kroymen]

I'd think that it should be e'mail. It's a contraction isn't it? Besides, I always have to complain about being given a restricted set of choices.

Please get a clue

[DragonHawk]

I've submitted a number of relevent articles over the past year or so. They dealt with real issues and questions about technology. This morning I start up my browser and see an article which is asking how to spell a word???????

Yup, that's right. Welcome to Slashdot.

Slashdot is run by a few guys looking to have fun. (They have also become moderately wealthy because Andover.net apparently considered Slashdot to be of great value, but due to their contractually guaranteed editorial independence, that is another matter entirely.) They do not run it to keep you happy, nor do they present or intend it to be an unbiased, objective, or even useful news source.

Please take note of the word "Submit" in the "Submit Story" link. Submit. "To commit to the consideration or judgment of another", according to my dictionary. The emphasis is mine. First, "consideration". When you submit a story, it is explicitly NOT guaranteed to be posted. Second, "by another". Not you. Them. The Slashdot editors will post what they darn well please, and if you don't like, that's just too bad.

... or you will eventually start to lose that portion of your readership which may be influential and have real decision-making powers.

Somehow, I suspect this is somewhere far below "refrigerator mold" on Rob's list of things to worry about.

In short: The submission queue is NOT your personal ego enhancement tool. If you don't like that, leave. And don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

This is ridiculous

[prisoner]

Who cares. Type it the way you like it. If more people would concentrate on putting something meaningful in their email and ensure that their screed is actually understandable, I'd be a happier person.

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[divec]

Questions of spelling, grammar, and usage cannot be resolved by appeal to typing speed!

Well, the answers to questions of pronunciation, grammar and usage have always evolved to facilitate *talking* speed in the past. e.g. you don't pronounce the gh in "night" - because it evolved that way. Email is the first really colloquial writing style in common use, so I would expect language to evolve to facilitate it too.

I think strong arguments can be made for abandoning the standard typing position

Speaking as somebody who has tried and abandoned learning Dvorak, the biggest problem with nonstandard keyboard layouts is programs like games which assume the layout is standard, e.g. games whose control keys are W,A,S,D / I,J,K,L for up,left,down,right. That, and operating systems which don't allow change of keyboard layout in user-space (try getting an unhelpful sysadmin to install such an "unusual" driver. And yes, I know that's a problem with the sysadmin and not the OS).

duh!

[marcro]

email.

Re:I agree with Don - let's use email now!

[divec]

let's just get rid of [the hyphen] now and save the world a few billion keystrokes per year.

Yours is a valiant and noble quest; however, I cannot join the crusade yet lest the health of my maths degree suffer :-( [ or should that be :( ? ]

Re:The difinitive answer?

[FPhlyer]

Okay. You have a point with the o'clock thing.

However, this is an exception, not a rule. Unfortunately, my dictionary (www.dictionary.com) does not trace the date of the first usage of this peice of slang (which is what I am sure it was at the time of it's first usage.

I can imagine someone sluring "It's eight of the clock" into "It's eight o'clock" in a scottish, irish, or cockney accent quite easily.

I think a better argument than the mere spelling of email would be for standards in email construction.

For instance, should you avoid indenting paragraphs in email? I always do. What about capitilization or sans-capitalization? Should one place a space between paragraphs as I often do, or let the whole un-indented body of text merge together?

the bbc has a similar article on grammar

[nkg]

To summarize:
Thanks to the Internet we are not using capital letters.
bbc article
my companies logo doesn't, but then it never has: earcandy looks/reads better than Earcandy or EarCandy if interested you can see the logo here

Re:Search engines will answer your question.

[divec]

If that were the case, "a lot" would be spelled "alot" or "allot".

Where do you think words like "helpful" come from? :-)

A note on email versus e-mail

[Fellgus]

Newly coined nonce words are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling ``e-mail''. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)

-- Donald E. Knuth (from here)

Re:A note on email versus e-mail

[gle]

No, it's émail, not email. But the fish ignores the acute is needed and helps the lazy guys typing.

____________________

The difinitive answer?

[FPhlyer]

A few years ago the editors over at "Wired" put out a guide to word usage for it's writers (similar to the Associated Press Stylebook" used by journalist around the U.S. Thier stylebook dictates that the proper usage is "email". No dash, lowercase 'e'. The "Jargon File" also seems to prefer this usage. I find that this makes good sense. If you write "electronic mail", you don't capitilize the 'e', so why should you capitilize it in the abbreviation? Of course... Wired doesn't always get everthing right now do they?

Re:The difinitive answer?

[PigleT]

"Wired" put out a guide to word usage for it's writers
Well, you ought to take up writing for Wired, that's all I can say to that ;)

<p>But seriously, kids, you wouldn't hyphenate "electronic-mail", so you wouldn't hyphenate the abbreviation, would you?
~Tim
--
.|` Clouds cross the black moonlight,

Re:The difinitive answer?

[Mwongozi]

Perhaps you might like to read the article first. Here are the bits you probably should have read:

Wired Style, Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age reflected that belief. Part manifesto, part working style guide, Wired Style attempted to impose a new language consciousness on the digerati, as the Web-savvy smart set enjoyed calling themselves. It is a tribute to their optimism that the book was published in hardcover.

Because of the democratic nature of e-mail (or, if you prefer, email), all these oppressive stylistic conventions could be jettisoned as so much anachronistic baggage. What counted now, according to webhead John Seabrook, was to encourage writing that appeared to have been "written on the spot, in one draft, immediately." It was no longer necessary to know your semicolon, or your syntax, from a hole in the ground.

But one day, the digital revolution was over. The big media companies wrested control of the Internet from the kids in the horned-rimmed glasses. It was time to grow up. Even the magazine and website parted company: Wired joined the Condé Nast stable, and Wired News was sold to Lycos.

Standards do matter. The principles of good English are always relevant.

Besides, the "e" means electronic, and a principal function of the hyphen is to join two words to form a completely new word. In this case, "electronic" and "mail." Ergo, e-mail.

I for one agree with them. It's "electronic mail", and when you shorten down two words you add a hyphen, you don't make a new word. Therefore, "e-mail".

The only viable alternative I can think of is "e'mail", just like "It is" becomes "It's".

uh

[JesusOfNazareth]

is this really that important subject? (i guess it is.... i just posted a comment... doh!) well since i'm here, i prefer email, because i'm too lazy to type the hyphen. in a perfect utopian society, though, there would be no email to begin with as we'd all be able to communicate through the use of brain waves. there would be an OSI model for brain communication, and CISCO would make brain routers (a brain network would be packet switched, i think). so there, i've changed subjects completely. haha!

what about email vs email's

[grover]

My personal peeve is the use of "emails" - i.e. that's the plural of email.

This makes no sense.

The plural of mail is mail. Why should adding an "e" at the beginning change things regarding pluralization?

calls for a /. poll

[Trevize]

So what are you waiting for? That's the next poll!
I vote for email. It's a common use word and should be easy to type...

Well, Microsoft Says.....

[shaunj]

According to the winword spellchecker, both are correct. So we know that Microsoft can't help us with our problems. And what a suprise that is ahem

Re:email, e-mail...

[acecccp]

moderators: who thought this was funny? i just imagined it said by that simpson's kid who is the son of a cop, always eats his crayons... now that made it funny, and fitting.

email, e-mail, ëmail

[Force]

I read a plea for using ëmail instead of email, e-mail (or even E-mail) a few years back (which is a lifetime in Internet Years). The rationale is that historically the dieresis has signified that the next vowel is to be treated as a separate syllable (e.g., "Charlotte Brontë", "coöperate"), but lost favour when computer typesetters couldn't reproduce them. You have to look at older books (usually from the UK) to see the dieresis in action. We just have to generalize the rule of when to use it to include the first syllable of a word.

When I wear my neo-pedant's hat, I try to resurrect the dieresis. It's a proper (useful) English diacritic mark, which always gets confused with the umlaut, a German diacritic with a completely different purpose. Now that ISO 10646 is slowly replacing ASCII, the dieresis can reclaim its place in English!

Bring back the dieresis!

Re:email, e-mail, ëmail

[Force]

It's a proper (useful) English diacritic mark,

(It also looks really cool, as lots of heavy metal bands have discovered :-)

- Förce

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[Moofie]

The same argument could be made for the English system of units. Not going to happen in the USA any time soon....

Oh really?

[DragonHawk]

The editorial staff has the responsibility to maintain consistancy ...

And where, pray tell, is this written?

Re:Oh really?

[rc-flyer]

Any editorial staff has that responsibility. If they don't, then they will eventually lose their readership.
Of course, this is my opinion. But speaking as someone who has been involved with computers for over 25 years, and as someone who DOES make technology decisions, I value my time, and will eventually stop reading SlashDot in favor of other venues if this continues.
If you want to influence major decision makers, you need to present a consistent image.
This is my opinion, disagreement with it is acceptable.

imail

[geekoid]

I was once asked:
If Internet start with an I, why is it called e-Mail?
true story.

Re:imail

[Felinoid]

A reasonable question for a techno newbie..
E for electronic.. the mail isn't confined to the Internet you can mail into Fidonet and Usenet from the Internet. You may not even notice the mail address leads to a point outside the Internet.

It isn't that hard to set up and run a gateway. People can now pick up mail on pagers and cell phones.. this isn't Imail but pager mail.. there is a gateway someplace to make this work. But it's all transparent to both sides.

So becouse mail can enter and leave the Internet painlessly it's not Internet mail.. just electronic.. generated on A network.. Your on the net... the other guy can be on Fido...

Re:Cowboy Neal

[Coplan]

I must agree to Cowboy Neal. For one, this is one thing that I would be interested in seeing what people prefer.

As for me, sometimes I use e-mail, sometimes I do email. Usually, it's e-mail. But I never use an uppercase "E", because I don't believe it to be a formal noun.

e-signature?

[Byteme]

Eventually there will be no need to differentiate. It is 'mail'. As the need for the hand delivery of pressed wood pulp diminishes, then will we really care to recognize the difference? Let us drop the 'e' from all buzz-words. It is getting old now. e-biz, e-commerce, e-royalties, e-cash, e-referral, e-porn... business is business, mail is mail, cash is cash...

Proper Spelling

[s1r_m1xalot]

I think that the proper spelling (as used on Slashdot) goes something like this:

• 3/\/\41|
• 
  Followed inevitably by

  1 4m l337 h4x0r, 1 0\/\/n j00!

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[Fred Ferrigno]

True, but you don't need a calculator and a conversion table to go type in Dvorak. An email (hah! both non-hyphenated and used as a singular noun!) typed in Dvorak is still legible to a person who doesn't know it. You don't have to convert the whole world if you want to type effficiently.

--

Re:Is this really necessary?

[divec]

Either get some consistency with your editorial selections, or you will eventually start to lose that portion of your readership which may be influential and have real decision-making powers.

Awww, did you get up on the wrong side of your bridge this morning? Seriously, I think one of the good things about slashdot is that it's a bit eccentric; it's not the New York Times or the Economist.

Re:Standard english rules

[Private Essayist]

No, it didn't destroy the parallel, for the principle is the same. Sometimes you get words that wind up being shortened, in addition to a hyphen being removed. Thus 'electronicmail' could have been a valid progression, but it was obviously too unwieldy and they moved right to 'email'.
________________

the hyphen has it

[thex23]

(a strange coincidence: I was in an argument with an exec about the hyphens in "small- to medium-size businesses"... and now this!)

I have come around to view "e-mail" as a better alternative, even though I used "email" in my "i'll spell it however i wanna" phase.

I write for a software company that makes B2B software, so I was forced to decided how to use that damned "e". I chose to use "e-mail", but "eCommerce", "eBusiness", etc. for the marketing jargon. Maybe I'll change my mind, but I didn't want to be faced with the possibility of "eMail"...

Obviously, "email" and "e-mail" are equally valid. I just think that the hyphen wins out because it is such a well-used word that it should be spelled "correctly" in a normal way, instead of in a "tech" context (I chose the lowercase e + Uppercase first letter scheme because it reminds me more of variable names: hence, more "tech").

The clincher, though, is that you would NEVER spell t-shirt "tshirt". or g-man "gman". just because its a vowel doesn't give the shortened form of "electronic" status as a real word.

just my $0.125

and not a mail!

[bluetoad]

That usage is spot on!

The use of the term mails is something that bugs me. The postman delivers mail not mails. You go through your mail not your mails.

Also you can send me a message, a letter (via snail mail) an email message ... but a mail? Someone might get their hopes up or offended if you try to send them a male!

Plural, NO. Uncountable, YES.

[dosowski]

The noun 'email' is plural, and should be used exactly the same way as the plural noun 'mail'.

'Mail' and 'email' are neither plural nor singular. They are uncountable nouns(is that the right term?), like water. You don't speak about how many mail, email, or water, you speak about how much.

A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[VSc]

I find this note from Don Knuth enlightning:

A note on email versus e-mail

Newly coined nonce words are often spelled with a hyphen, but the hyphen disappears when the words become widely used. For example, people used to write ``non-zero'' and ``soft-ware'' instead of ``nonzero'' and ``software''; the same trend has occurred for hundreds of other words. Thus it's high time for everybody to stop using the archaic spelling ``e-mail''. Think of how many keystrokes you will save in your lifetime if you stop now! The form ``email'' has been well established in England for several years, so I am amazed to see Americans being overly conservative in this regard. (Of course, ``email'' has been a familiar word in France much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason.)

Btw, "Micro-soft" had a hyphen too..

__________________________________________

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[Fzz]

I started using email regularly in 1985 in England. Everyone always called it email, not e-mail, and only when talking to a non-techie might we say "electronic mail". I think we always regarded it as a noun (and verb and adjective) in its own right, not an abbreviation of anything.

On another note, I've started to notice people saying things like "send me an email". This always makes me cringe. "Send me email", or "send me an email message" are both fine, but "an email" is just plain wrong. Does this annoy anyone else, or shall I just crawl back under my rock?

- Fzz

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[Moofie]

I go crazy trying to switch between my HP 48 RPN calculator and "standard" algebraic notation calcs. I'm sure that trying to learn a new keyboard layout would cause an aneurysm, having to switch back and forth on all the different computers I use day to day.

I can't wait for the day I can carry around a lightweight, inexpensive, modestly powered "laptop" that can act as a console for any computer I encounter, with a minimum of configuration on the "server" side. THAT would be a killer piece of hardware!

Back on topic, anybody who worries about email versus e-mail had better have the rest of their grammatical ducks in a row...otherwise they're wasting their time. : )

Hyphens suck.

Re:A remark from Don Knuth on the subject..

[Fred Ferrigno]

I've used an HP48 in the past, and now use a TI calculator (I'm taking a class where TIs are required). I have to say that I really miss my RPN, and truth be told, I occaisionally get mixed up and try to use RPN on my TI. I dunno, I have less problems in Qwerty than in Dvorak. Qwerty is kinda ingrained in my brain and I rarely forget the layout, but switching to Dvorak from Qwerty is initially a little confusing.

Also, it's worth noting that there are keyboards out there that can switch back and forth between Dvorak and Qwerty on the hardware level with a switch. Whether or not you want to carry a keyboard around wherever you go is up to you. ;)

--

Re:and not an email...

[bluetoad]

and not an email either!

The really important question

[SlippyToad]

Is whether or not there's a hyphen in "anal retentive."

Re:The really important question

[Tuxedo Mask]

that's "anally retentive" to you buster

Re:The really important question

[Clith]

>Is whether or not there's a hyphen in "anal retentive."

No hyphen, but I definitely think there is a colon.

eh-mail

[Daniel Jansen]

Canucks know -- it's eh-mail. ;-)

Re:eh-mail

[multipartmixed]

Actually, French Canadians really should know. L'Office de la Langue Française (coloquially known in English Canada as "The Language Police") officially coined the word "couriel" three years ago. It's a conjunction of "courrier électronique".

--

a missed opportunity

[The_Messenger]

That would have been perfect if he'd said "Personally I'm two lazy to care about the proper use of homonyms . . ." Man, the one time Rob would've been applauded for fucking up, he doesn't. We can't count on that bastard for anything. (Kids, this is what listening to the Satan-worshipping "Guess Who" will do to your brain! We must ferret out the hippie element in our midst!)

---------///----------
All generalizations are false.

Why?

[lpontiac]

The article states, "Standards do matter. The principles of good English are always relevant." What it doesn't state is a good reason why.

Take a look at all the reasons given. To establish a look. To appear qualified and up-to-date. To keep the New York Times looking like the New York Times. Can anyone else spell marketdroid?

None of the reasons given are attributed to any underlying cultural or linguistic reasons - instead, the change towards more "rigidity" is attributed to the web becoming more mainstream (or is that main-stream?) and corporatised. In other words, using a particular spelling is good because it helps you establish a brand, differentiate it and sell lots of it.

The best way for a portal to generate hits? Maybe. But some sort of cultural guideline that the average person should worry about adhering to? No.

Re:Why?

[AoT]

Take a look at all the reasons given. To establish a look. To appear qualified and up-to-date. To keep the New York Times looking like the New York Times. Can anyone else spell marketdroid? shouldn't marketdroid have a hyphen in there?

e-mail vs email??

[Racer X]

about as interesting as stupid post vs stupid-post.

Re:Is this really necessary?

[spankenstein]

So is that "mega-pissed" or megapissed?

I see your problem

[DragonHawk]

Any editorial staff has that responsibility.

Again: This is not a law of nature. It is, perhaps, accepted practice in many circles, but there is nothing that says It Must Be So.

If they don't, then they will eventually lose their readership.

The publishers of the "National Enquirer" would no doubt disagree with you.

I value my time, and will eventually stop reading SlashDot in favor of other venues if this continues.

Again: This is not something Rob (the guy who runs Slashdot) cares too much about. It is an idle threat; it provides no force.

If you want to influence major decision makers...

I think I begin to see your error. Namely, the assumption that Rob & Co want to influence major decision makers. They don't. They want to have fun. As the tagline says, this is "News for Nerds". It isn't "News for Major Decision Makers". Those two sets may intersect, but they are not mutually inclusive.

Don't get me wrong -- you're welcome here, or as welcome as any of us are. But you have to accept Slashdot for what it is. If you're not willing to do that, you're right -- this is the wrong site for you, and you should go elsewhere.

Cheers,

The truth

[phwiffo]

Dashes only really count in regular expressions. Anything else is just a decoration.

language is alive

[cjj]

As long as people understand, it's correct.

They are 2 different things

[urtica]

email is what I use
e-mail belongs to marketroids

Just 2 versions?

[kritanus]

Take a look in any german computer-magazin and you will find at least 4 versions. Here a few examples: email, e-mail, E-mail, e-Mail, E-Mail, eMail.
But who cares how e-mail is spelled as long as most users use html in their mails or have rows with more than 80 chars...

Lazy programmers...

[Any_User]

are the source of the term 'email.' That really ticks me off the author had to throw that nonsense (non-sense) in.

Actually...

[crypto_creek]

The toilet roll should be placed so that the paper hangs down on the outside.

Collective

[esper]

IIRC, the technically correct term is collective nouns. (Is "Borg" a collective noun?)

Cowboy Neal

[Rupert]

Come on, guys! We haven't had a decent poll in months, and when but when decent poll fodder does come along, you post it as an article.

Post this as a poll. You could probably do the same with some of the lameness that gets foisted on us in Ask Slashdot, too.

--

Is this really necessary?

[rc-flyer]

I've submitted a number of relevent articles over the past year or so. They dealt with real issues and questions about technology.
This morning I start up my browser and see an article which is asking how to spell a word???????
Come on, guys. Either get some consistency with your editorial selections, or you will eventually start to lose that portion of your readership which may be influential and have real decision-making powers.
Jonathan Bayer, Director of Technology at Dynamic Logic

Re:Is this really necessary?

[rc-flyer]

I am disgruntled only because of the total nonsense of the original posting. If something this irrevelent is posted, then why aren't other, more relevent postings let through.
SlashDot will lose the most influential members of it's readership if these kind of articles keep getting posted.
In regards to my own previous postings, it is kind of ironic that quite often postings get rejected, only to have virtually the same one accepted a little later. This has happened to me and to many others. The editorial staff has the responsibility to maintain consistancy, yet all too often they demonstrate a total lack of consistancy.

Re:Is this really necessary?

[rc-flyer]

My decision-making powers include deciding what OS's to use on our servers. For those who are curious, we use mostly RedHat Linux 6.2, although an upgrade to 7.0 is planned in the next few months. We have 24 servers running behind a load balancer, and so far have not had any problems with the systems. There are also a couple of Sun boxes which we need to keep for political reasons. The load balancer is a CoyotePoint Equalizer.

Re:Is "anal-retentive"...

[smyle]

Flamebait? You're joking. This is hilarious.

G-spot or Gspot?

[Zugok]

Something to think about...

If it were just about e-mail, I'd say ditch the -.

[Dr. Zed]

I could see "email", if it weren't for the fact that there's a lot of e-'s out there. The "e-" means something that can't be easily defined by "e".

There are so many e-'s. I don't think ecommerice, ebusiness, ebanking, etc. would necessarily cause a problems, but you can't create a system where a beginning e means "e-". On the other hand, adding the "e-" to just about any word will create a new meaning.

If I wrote "e-gaming", people would know what I mean. The word "egaming" wouldn't have the same immediate recognision. egam? Is that pronounced egg-am? Maybe not the best example, but the point is, you can't account for every possibility.

Sure, you can decide it's "email", but still keep the "e-" for everything else. But in my opinion, "email" is just laziness. There's little need for a "new word".

The next thing you know, you would get people wondering what an electronic cho is. Think about it.

..

[vbrtrmn]

how about fe-male? or female?

which one is it?

i see my karma falling falling

--
you are not what you own

its just mail

[gedanken]

i haven't sent a snail mail message in a long time that wasn't to pay a bill or something. Even that case is going away. When i talk to people its just "mail me this" or "mail me that." I think we have progressed beyond the the disassociation of the two forms. And if we haven't then its about time we did.

D'oh mail

[Steve Cox]

The only part of their web site that follow their 'standard' is the article.

You are still invited to 'Email this to a friend.' at the bottom of the page, and to 'Email it' at the top of the page.

According to accepted English usage...

[gavinhall]

Posted by polar_bear:

it should be email by now. In the beginning, when it was a newish concept, it should have been "e-mail" after a period of use, it would be appropriate to drop the hyphen and simply call it email. I believe that the Associated Press style guide and the MLA style guide, as well as the Chicago Guide to Style should offer some insight. When in doubt, consult Strunk and White.

It's just mail to me

[Felinoid]

E-mail.. or email.. Electronic mail... Internet Mail.. It's just mail to me...
I've been receaving e-mail sence the 1980s. Back on BBSes.
I ran my own from 1983 to 1987. and annother from 1989 to 1992.
FidoMail, Usenet Mail, BBS Mail, Unix Mail, Internet Mail, It's all just mail to me..
That stuff I get in the post box is "junk" and "Bills"... Anyone know how to proc filter it?

American is not English

[Criggie]

Who cares?

Most readers of slashdot presume to reside in America and speak English... whereas the rest of the world knows that Americans speak American, which is a descendant of English, and *happens* to be co-understandable, like German/Austrian.

Words are munged and spellings get brutalised. Call it what it is, American, not English.

Elevator/lift, sidewalk/footpath, manual/stick, lazer/laser, the list is huge!

(only semi serious, but my point still holds true)

Webster says: e-mail

[Down8]

I was asked in my [don't shun me] Advanced Writing for Business class how it is spelled, and I luckily had my Webster's New World College Dictionary, Third Edition, 1996, on me, so:

e-|mail (e'mal) n. [also E-] [Colloq.] short for ELECTRONIC MAIL

I always use the hyphen, b/c I listen to my e-mail over the phone sometimes, and I prefer to be phonetically correct, which happens to be how Webster, our Scrabble go to, sees it too.

-bZj

e-commerce.....

[tomknight]

The (ex)MD of my company insisted that in all company publications, we refer to e-commerce (as eCommerce, because (in his words) "this will be the way it is spelled". It appears that one of our third party conractors persuaded him that this spelling was the way forward and to adopt it would position us at the forefront of... (yadda yadda yadda...)

Because we did this when he insisted - and yes, R&D did object - all our brochures etc. still say eCommerce.

Bloody stupid....and he didn't even have pointy hair!

Difference.

[tomknight]

I don't give an iota......

hm, good point

[bee]

I will adjust my rant on this subject accordingly in the future. :-) Thanks.

---

its pop-cubed-mail and smtp-mail

[banbeans]

cuz i log into a pop3 server to get it
but when i send it its smtp-mail for the same reason

And the opposite?

[gle]

Do you write smail or s-mail?

I prefer email because I've had e-nough of those e-nonsense...
BTW, who cares, and how will it change my life if I write e-mail?
Here in France, this would well be qualified as an "enculage de mouches". Feel free to translate...

____________________

Re:And the opposite?

[smyle]

According to babelfish: "enculage of flies"

Although I may have some reasonable guesses as to 'enculage', it still didn't help much.

Re:And the opposite?

[jawtheshark]

"enculage de mouches" means "buttfucking flies"

And before you mod me down for this stupid translation, it actually means 'nitpicking', but you guessed that...

How about this topic...

[digitalmind]

Instead of putting this under a news heading (which it isn't)

Create a new, improved topic called "mindless drivel that noone in their right mind cares about"...

And the logo should be a picture of George W bush.



Kris
botboy60@hotmail.com
Nerdnetwork.net

Natural Evolution of Words

[Crutcher]

In my various English Lit. courses, the rule was always noted that one of the common word formation paths goes like this:

"foo bar" for a while,
then "foo-bar", when it becomes very common,
finally "foobar", when few can remember it as
the first, seperate words.

Seems about right,

"electronic mail"
"electronic-mail"
"e-mail"
"email"

Stop whinning.

-- Crutcher --
#include <disclaimer.h>

Re:Standard english rules

[Erataikasu]

The path for 'email' was 'electronic mail', 'electronic-mail', 'e-mail', and finally 'email'.

Of course a lot of people these days are just referring to email as mail, so maybe that's the final destination.

e-mail versus E-Mail

[TexasCowboy23]

Being one to hate abbreviations (notice I spelled "versus" rather than just type "vs"), I have for around five years called e-mail, E-Mail. Yeah, I hit my beloved key twice. To me, E-Mail is a concept needing to be capitalized upon -- hence the capitalization of the words. I am, by no means, an expert at English Grammer, but I do rank above average. I've just adopted my own style. Someone mentioned the age of Instant Messages where thirty-year-olds write like they were really ten, skipping punctuation not out of style but rather out of sheer laziness. The English language itself is very fluid and is one of the most changing languages today. (Hey, look at Latin. The language stop evolving and is now declared a dead language. What's up with that?) When I was a freshman in college four years ago, one of my Information Systems professors and I got into a fairly heated discussion over him deducting points for my spelling of "E-Mail" as compared to his belief is should have been "email" ... He conceded that had I spelled it "e-mail," he would have considered reinstating the points. But he didn't feel that it should have capitalization, because it obviously didn't fit in line with good grammar. IMHO, capitalization (in the English language) is sought to capture attention. (What if we spelled the first day of the week as "sunday?") And to me, "E-Mail" (or "e-mail" or "email") needs to grab attention. This is the age of the new economy after all. Anyhow, that is my two cents worth.

Thanks to the military, I learned how to use abbreviations, and have even resorted to using abbreviations such as BTW (By The Way), IMHO (In My Humble Opinion, as seen above), AFK (Away From Keyboard). Not meant to be contradicting myself; I just see abbreviations as either a tool or a deteriment. For example, if I said to you, "Hey, I want to go buy a CD." Your next question would be probably, "Which one?" If I then responded, "I'll make my decision when we get to the bank," you'd then be confused. The abbreviation "CD" means two different things. If I walk into a music store and ask for a "CD," they look at me funny and just point to all the shelves of thousands of Compact Discs. I walk into a bank and ask for a "CD," they pull out documents left and right, charts, interest rates, you name it -- all showing me Certificate of Deposits.

You say tomato, I say tomahto...

[gando]

You say potatoe, I say spud...

Sounds like a good poll.

Email..ha

[JerryNY]

Ill just keep typing it as electronic mail, thank you very much!

e- mail

[Linknoid]

I wish I had seen this story earlier, as there are so many comments by now that the chance of anyone actually reading this one is pretty slim, but I wish I could shout this out to anyone who is listening.

The means of information transmission for e-mail is through the movement of electrons, as opposed to the entire atom/molecules/ions that compose ordinary mail. Hasn't anyone ever taken Physics or Chemistry? Remember what the standard way of representing an electron is? It's an e with a superscript minus sign next to it. Now since we want to show that the mail is being transmitter primarily via electrons, we prepend the symbol for electron to the word mail. Unfortunately, superscript capabilities aren't considered universal, so to make it simple, it's just written as e-mail.

Of course, I think it should be spelled e- mail, but e-mail is close enough.

e-mail, email? Both are wrong!

[tinic]

Actually it should be 'eamail' like earwax or eased.

"email" don't play by those rules

[anonymous cowerd]

The noun 'email' is plural, and should be used exactly the same way as the plural noun 'mail'.

No, email is a brand new word with a life of its own and it is not at all required to follow the same usage as the older word "mail", any more than "television" should be restricted to a range of meanings comparable to that of its root word "vision". Like all other words, the word "email" means what people who use the word "email" mean by it, and if they decide to widely use this new word in a grammatical sense that is not precisely analogous to its root word "mail," then they are free to do so.

Like so very many other English words, "email" has more than one meaning, and the reader or listener is required to distinguish between them by reasoning from the context. In this quote:

An email is a single message which one receives via one's email, that is, one's network mail system. Some users receive hundreds of emails a day. You never know from day to day what will turn up amidst your email.

the first "email" in those sentences does not mean the same as the second, yet you immediately know, reading it, what each instance of "email" means. Note that I have included an example, the last, of "email" as a plural noun, and another, the second-to-last, where the plural of "email" is "emails" instead.

...This used to be standard usage before about 1993 or so (see September that never ended), but sadly seems to be the minority usage now.

Nothing at all "sad" about it; neology is good! What's sad is when a language ceases to change, grow, evolve; what you call it then is a "dead language."

Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

the marketeers email

[phoebe]

While it might be e-mail or email now those fantastic people in the marketing world want it to be e-mail presumably to go with e-business, e-commerce, because we're only just in the e-lectronic revolution now?

Where's my e-toaster?

That's an italic 'e' if you didn't notice because we couldn't possibly just use plain 'e' could we?

What 'rules'? The rules of ignorance?

[bee]

More like the influx of ignorants spam up our language the same way they've spammed up Usenet and other such forums that used to be useful. Go read the followup to my post that describes how they're abusing the perfectly good word 'software' down in Brazil. It's all part of the dumbing down of America and by proxy, the world. We already have television that plays to the lowest common denominator; the last thing I want to see is an Internet that ends up AOLized.

---

Lately I've been calling it...

[nlabadie]

What the hell is the stupid *&$%#*% TNEF/Windmail.dat garbage that you keep sending me?

Linguistics

[steeef]

there have always been language purists. people who think "ain't" and "alot" aren't really words. but english is an evolving language, and these words gradually become accepted as part of the english language. both "e-mail" and "email" are correct, as pretty much everyone will understand either. it's a pretty safe bet that "email" will outlive "e-mail" though

Mail?

[Miskatonic]

I thought Unix users referred to it as just "mail," as per the command, using the term "snail mail" in those strange instances when one should wish to use that paper and ink stuff. The "e" is just for people who don't already assume that mail should be electronic.

In any event, I suspect the hyphenated form will fade from use, much as spellings like "to-day" have fallen out of use.

Respect the Great and Powerful Knuth

[Gameboy70]

Yes, it's true that spelling often has little to do with pronunciation (which is why I suck at it), but past ambiguities are no excuse for creating new ones. Too late. We all spell it "email" and pronounce it with a long E. Deal with it.

Changelog?

[abischof]

• With clarity in mind, we've made a number of other minor changes intended to keep the prose moving. There's no point in enumerating them here. Some may jump out at you. Most will probably go unnoticed. But if we've made the right choices, you should be able to move at flank speed and still come away with a good sense of what you've just read.

Considering the changes that they allude to, I'd find a Changelog to be quite helpful :). I'm being serious. I mean, wouldn't that be appropriate?

Alex Bischoff
---

Re:email, e-mail...

[SUWAIN]

No, no, no... This is a reference to an interesting translation of a recent article in c't magazine with Linus. Linus said "I... read a bunch of email". The word "email" translates to "enamel", so it ended up reading "I... read a bunch of enamel."

But don't think I'm flaming you... I'm yet to see anyone who has even mentioned the story behind these enamel jokes.

...............
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name

Email started in 1996???

[lar3ry]

Wow! I didn't know that those of us that used electronic mail to communicate (I can remember sending email as far back as 1982) had to wait for some company to be born in 1996 to tell us in the year 200 that we should hyphenate the word!

If they want to call it "e-mail" or "email" or even "fred" -- the fact remains that this is shere stupidity and triteness beyond belief. Why is Wired News so self-important that they are going to lecture to those of us that have been around for so much longer on how we should be spelling terms that have been in place for years before they even existed?

Besides, the "e" means electronic, and a principal function of the hyphen is to join two words to form a completely new word. In this case, "electronic" and "mail." Ergo, e-mail.

Hmmm. Let's see: A keeper of books can be referred to as a "bookkeeper" and I don't see any hyphenation between the two words.

Look. There ain't no official RULES for the English language, despite the claims of third-grade English teachers, except "COMMON USAGE." We have no august body of language lawyers to tell us that our language is in jeopardy of being diluted. Look at the period in the first sentence in this paragraph... it lies within the quotes. However, I've seen many people put the period AFTER the quotes... and I don't think that either way is more or less intelligible.

If they want to hyphenate "email" then let them. They can even put the hyphen after the "a" in the word for all I care.

If I decide that their usage is unreadable, I'll simply stop reading their silly pronouncements.

--

Mail mail everywhere

[Rob Parkhill]

Although I prefer email, e-mail lets it fit in with the other mails:

p-mail - that which comes by letter carrier
v-mail - does anyone still own an answering machine?
t-mail - encryption is your friend

Re:Your Sig (OT)

[Anonymous Coward]

When you mix Pasto and AntiPasto, would the resulting reaction produce a huge explosion?

At the start of a sentence?

[Mwongozi]

Everyone seems to agree, whether "e-mail" or "email", that it has a lower-case "e". But what happens if you wanted to start a sentence with it?

E-mail and Email looks just plain ugly.

"e-mail", "email"....."mail"?

[NTSwerver]

IMO email/e-mail should simply be referred to as mail

Mail (as in paper in envelope stuff) should be referred to as snail mail.

----------------------------

Should be e-

[bmongar]

I really think it should be e- on all e-words not because I don't think they are real words, but as the number of e-words grows it may be hard to determine if it is an e-word or some strange word that begins with e. The hyphen makes it stand out as a seperate sound, which shows it's importance as a representation of an entire word.

Knuth

[Grace Hopper]

I write "email" instead of "e-mail". Why? Because Don Knuth (CS stud) says so!
--

"Monetize"?

[abischof]

Warning: This post contains a SPOILER, in that the quoted paragraph below is (IMHO) one of the best in the article, and I don't want to ruin the surprise of coming across this gem in your reading of the original article...

• These are fingernails-on-the-blackboard words, real shiver-up-the-spine stuff: "functionality," "implementation," "bleeding edge," "leverage," "next-generation," "monetize," "mission critical." You can almost see the language curling into a fetal position to await the deathblow. "Monetize," for crying out loud.

Anyhow, what does "monetize" mean? Really, I had no idea that it was even a pretend-word..

Alex Bischoff
---

From altavista

[L Fitzgerald Sjoberg]

word count: email: 59305232; e mail: 66949825

That settles it, it's "e-mail".

On the other hand, this test gives us "donut" as the proper spelling of "doughnut," which is one battle I will never surrender.

MLA Website

[Silas]

The MLA (which maintains a widely used standard for journalists and writers) says it's "e-mail". At least, that's what they use on their website, and you'd hope they'd practice internal consistency - anyone have a copy of the Guide to reference?.

Standard english rules

[Private Essayist]

By now, it should be 'email.' This follows standard English usage which puts a hyphen between compound words at first. After this compound word gets used for a while, and society gets used to it, the hyphen gets dropped.

The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th Ed., on p. 203, says:

"A closed (or solid) compound is a combination of two or more elements, originally separate words, now spelled as one word. Examples: henhouse, typesetting, makeup, notebook."

Thus 'typesetting' probably began as 'type setting', and then moved to 'type-setting', and finally became 'typesetting.'

The path for 'email' was 'electronic mail', 'electronic-mail', 'e-mail', and finally 'email'.

One rule, when in doubt, is to check an unabridged (recent) dictionary. If a word has progressed to the closed compound stage, it will be in the dictionary without the hyphen, and that would mean it is now valid to use it that way.
________________

Its e'mail

[Banjonardo]

It COULD BE A contraction, just like "do not" is don't and "have not" is haven't, "electronic mail" is e'mail, but it is obviously e-mail. Come on, do you say gspot? NO, you say G-Spot so its e-mail. Done.

don't blame this on programmers

[Evil Grinn]

"email" as a solid word certainly evolved because some programmer was either too lazy or too ignorant to correctly insert the hyphen in the first place.

Yeah, well just try to compile this:

main() {
char* e-mail = "Hello, e-mail world!\n";
printf(e-mail);
}

If you're going to blame things on programmers, at least realize that it's just correct code to write it without the hyphen. I know that this has no bearing on its use in English, but the article tries to make that point.

It is a noun, and a verb, as well as a subject.

[Zero__Kelvin]

I see a lot of criticism of /. for posting this; that's too bad, because it is important. In fact the first client I ever had that wasn't tech-savy wanted to know the answer to this very question. Now I realize that not every /. reader is a professional, but for those of us who are, or for those who ever intend to be some day, the question is important!

I would have loved to have known the correct answer off the top of my head, but I didn't :(

I was happy to see that here it was, being given the consideration it deserves, until I actually started reading the posts. My good mood quickly turned to a waining faith in humanity as I read all these "who cares" and "I'm too lazy" comments posted with an obvious pride, though :(

ObOnTopicComponent:

I still don't know the correct answer, or even if there is a correct answer. I like E-mail, perhaps because I'm a bit of a purist in some respects when it comes to the written word. If any one knows of a correct (i.e. citable and cited) answer please be sure and post it!

English Language Problems

[bjorky]

Although I write it email, it should be something more like e-mail, e'mail, or eMail to distinguish the e as a separate entity. Otherwise, upon first viewing by people way out of the loop or non-native english speakers, they'll pronounce it (uh-mayl), the same way that people who don't know Germanic charachters pronounce Björk to rhyme with fork and not smirk.



-----

eMail

[the_germ]

I write eMail! Looks nice!

someone else cares

[fleener]

I had this argument at my school newspaper 5 years ago with the newspaper's advisor. I went apeshit. This was a time when using the word "e-mail" required you to explain what you meant by it. Anyone coming from the usenet or BBS scene remembers clearly that "email" has no hyphen.

Every time I wrote a story I wrote "email" in defiance and let the editor "correct" it. To me it was a sign of the continued butchering of our language by the news media (like "hacker" but on a smaller scale).

The Associated Press stylebook (the Bible for journalists) did not address the issue, but a couple years later decided "e-mail" was correct. I now use "e-mail" to fit in, just like how I've stopped trying to use the word "hacker" correctly.

If language evolution is any indicator, in about 10 years we will see the hyphen disappear and we'll be back to the pure form of the word.

What worries me is these nutjobs who spell it "eMail." They're mental.

email, e-mail...

[orabidoo]

just call it enamel!

Ironic

[CharlieG]

Isn't it a tad ironic, that the hyperlinks at the end of the article say

EMail

Associated Press uses e-mail

[Alley Viper]

For those of you who give a good damn what the AP has to say about anything. (The same people who say axe is an unacceptable substitute for ax.)

IMHO, it's email

[InsomniacsDream]

Lets see. I can pull out my dictionary and find a slew of word combinations that aren't hyphenated such as handcart, handlebar, textbook, schoolmate. This would seem to fly in the face of the editor's claim that these should remain hyphenated.

We had this same debate at my company a while back and all of the business types chose e-mail, and all of the geek types chose email. That should tell you something.

The bigger question: web site or website?

[KFury]

Back at CKS Partners, we had a battle waging for years as to whether the company should standardize on 'web site' or 'website'. Seriously, it was worse than 'gif vs gif'.

What do you think?

Oh, and email, definitely. After all, people use voicemail more often than voice-mail, and just because electronicmail is more ungainly than electronic-mail doesn't mean we should keep the hyphen when it's reduced.

Kevin Fox

Re:The bigger question: web site or website?

[Tower]

I pronounce 'gif': 'skippy' (super chunk, of course).

--

The proper flavour of English

[NReitzel]

Clearly, the Brits have decided that hyphens are stylish when it comes to things e-lectronic. However, I do not feel that one should permit one solitary island nation to colour our opinionnes on such ubiquitous issues. Therefore, I have lent my support to the less fustian venacular, and have penned off this post whilst drinking my morning tea.

It's eMail.

Knuth says it's "email".

[Dom2]

According to Knuth, the correct term is email. And I for one don't feel comfortable disagreeing with Knuth. :-)

email, e-mail...

[VTRhyno]

Eventually the letter email will just become mail and the letter E will be allowed to resume its role as the fifth letter of the alphabet.

"Email" in Dutch means something totally different

[Koos]

I try to use "e-mail" for Internet mail because the Dutch 'email' means enamel, which can be confusing.

I prefer e-mail.

[AFCArchvile]

Besides, email sometimes gets bungled up during a spell check (not in winword, though; damn M$ trying to alienate the language once again), and "email" looks too much like the name of a process.

However, I won't protest the use of "Email" in the Slashdot site; it goes along with "userlogin" and "emailpasswd"; these just add to that abbreviated, concise, nerdy feel of Slashdot that we all have enjoyed (well, at least the legitimate Slashdot users).

Re:But if you ask people who care about spelling..

[jesser]

Preview altered my post in the textarea but showed the original in the preview area!@?

--

From the Who the F*CK Cares Dept...

[Leghorn]

Tomato, tomato, potato, potato...let's call the whole thing off!

e-mail

[ozbird]

Email is an Australian whitegoods manufacturer; looks like it has to be "e-mail", then.

Rubbish

[ishrat]

As long as people are getting the point why bother.

Wired Footers

[braeden]

Wired doesn't hyphenate "E-mail" in the footers following their articles. HEH.

Search engines will answer your question.

[DeadSea]

The proper way to spell a word is the way most people spell it. Language is governed by usage. If two spellings of a word are popular, both should probably be included in the dictionary. Your favorite search engine will tell you which spelling is more popular.
I use Google.

email - 55,000,000 pages.
e-mail - 3,560,000 pages.