"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

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.

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my friends mom

[siokaos]

My friends mom calls it "e"

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

Both terms are wrong.

[billcopc]

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

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..

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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.

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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.
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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.