To put a hyphen or not to put a hyphen? That is the question which most of us ask ourselves when we type the abbreviated version of electronic mail.
Wired Magazine communicates that it should be hyphenated. Meanwhile, The New Hacker’s Dictionary draws on email in its glossary and Geek.com uses the hyphen. The Compact OED in UK approves email, while both Merriam-Webster and the Chicago Manual of Style in the US demand e-mail. Apple uses email. Microsoft usually uses e-mail but sometimes email. Adobe uses both. Google and Yahoo prefer email. CNN uses e-mail. The New York Times uses e-mail.
While according to Dictionary.com (my trusted site for spelling and definition), 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. So, that’s another reason for me to to stick with email.
And this is what Wikipedia has to say:
The spellings e-mail and email are both common. Several prominent journalistic and technical style guides recommend e-mail, and the spelling email is also recognized in many dictionaries. In the original RFC neither spelling is used; the service is referred to as mail, and a single piece of electronic mail is called a message.
Newer RFCs and IETF working groups require email for consistent capitalization, hyphenation, and spelling of terms. ARPAnet/DARPAnet users and early developers from Unix, CMS, AppleLink, eWorld, AOL, GEnie, and HotMail used eMail with the letter M capitalized. The authors of some of the original RFCs used eMail when giving their own addresses.
Donald Knuth considers the spelling e-mail to be archaic, and notes that it is more often spelled email in the UK. In other European languages the word email has a completely different meaning: “enamel”.
Personally, I prefer it without the hyphen just because I’m sluggish. But Wired Magazine definitely has a point, “e” does stand for electronic and therefore e-mail is indeed two words. Thus, e-mail makes sense. However, most of the us are not going to sidetrack overnight and you’ll see ample of emails scattered around.
I don’t want to sound like a grammar police but I believe it should be standardized. Nobody knows how to spell email. Or you might say, “nobody knows how to spell e-mail,†but you’d be mistaken. Or would you? Nobody knows and perhaps nobody cares…
hiddennis 