How do you spell "e-mail"? (original) (raw)

[This is a fast-access FAQ excerpt.] In September 1995, Jeff Adams (jeffa@kurz-ai.com) did a search on "a corpus of about 40 million words of Usenet news articles", and counted the following forms: email 19371 e-mail 15359 E-mail 7572 Email 5906 E-MAIL 3659 E-Mail 2986 EMAIL 1269 EMail 521 eMail 303 e-Mail 42 eMAIL 5 and several other forms each rare enough to be probably "just dumb typos". Total without hyphen: 27378 Total with hyphen: 29622 Bob Cunningham searched articles posted to alt.usage.english between mid-May and mid-September 1995, found 604 instances of "e-mail" and 235 of "email". A 1995 poll of subscribers to the Copyediting-L mailing list produced 60 votes for "e-mail" and 24 votes for "email". In favour of "e-mail", it has been argued that there are analogous nonce compounds in "e-" (e.g, "e-vote", "e-boyfriend"); that the hyphen is a clue that the word is stressed on the first syllable; and that email is French for "enamel". In favour of "email", it has been argued that this is the spelling used in the Jargon File, and that there has been a general trend away from hyphenating words once they become established. Many dictionaries favour "E-mail", which can be justified by analogy with such forms as "A-bomb", "C-section", and "G-string". [See more statistics for numbers of people using the spellings 'e-mail' and 'email'.]