"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

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?

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.

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.

---

Both are correct

[yist]

The jargon file seems to prefer "email" however.

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

[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

Both terms are wrong.

[billcopc]

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

FSF recommendation:

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU/email

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?

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..

__________________________________________

The really important question

[SlippyToad]

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

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

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.
________________

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...

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

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.