Proper Spelling
Recently I was asked; “What is the correction format for the shorted term for ‘electronic mail’.
When asked I have to admit I didn’t know. I have seen it displayed as email, e-mail, E-Mail and E-mail, as well as others. Many times I myself have used eMail and at times E-mail.
I began a search and discovered that there isn’t a documented agreed upon format.
Many dictionaries seem to use the form E-Mail, with their reasoning coming from other such as X-ray and T-shirt.
In 2006 the ‘email experience council’ (they do use all small letters in their name) issued a statement that they were establishing ‘the official spelling for electronic mail as email’. And that the word should follow standard spelling rules such as using Email, when it’s the first word of the sentence.
The email experience council or the eec is an organization that “… email marketing arm of the Direct Marketing Association, is a global professional organization that strives to enhance the image of email marketing and communications …”. One of their first orders of business when forming in 2006 was to develop this standard for the word email.
Even though there isn’t an agreed upon standard, other than that of the eec, I have decided to use from now on to use email as the proper format. That is until an official format is determined. In someways this seems like the logical direction that it is heading.
Email is becoming so much of a common word in our language, that it is really becoming a word. Not too many even are aware that it is short for Electronic Mail.
This leads to the question about some of the other technical words.
Should it be Website, Web Site or something else?
This seems to have a standard. Since Web is short for World Wide Web, a proper noun, it should be written as Web site. A page on the site is a Web page.
It would lead to that it is Internet for the same reason.
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Comments
As you apparently used to – I use the spelling ‘eMail’.
I’m sorry but some upstart – fly by night organization that isn’t totally organized and with little or no influence or authority over pretty much anything (currently) isn’t enough to get me to change.
If these folks were at least on the level of the W3C or IEEE or ISO/IEC then I’d be more inclined to reassess my usage.
Having the word run together visually as in ‘Email’ or ‘email’ simply goes against proper english rules (not that most people use them anyway) but if it were to be spelled as the EEC (yes I did that on purpose) would want us to then the pronunciated should be a’short e’ sound and NOT a ‘long e’ sound.
And as far as some of the more prominent Dictionaries (as you mentioned) use E-Mail or E-mail or some variation with the hyphen seperation – I would follow them long before I bothered with the EECs rules.
Also of note the combination of letter ‘e’ ‘m’ ‘a’ ‘i’ ‘l’ – ‘email’ is of french origin and has nothing to do with electronic mail.
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