The Washington Post is dropping the hyphen from e-mail . Bill Walsh, who calls himself “the keeper, more or less, of The Post’s style manual,” isn’t happy about having to make the change. I find his reasoning sound:
While it’s true that commonly used two-word or hyphenated compounds often solidify into single words over time, that had never before happened with a compound based on a single letter. We had T-shirts and X-rays for a long time before electronic mail showed up, but we still aren’t writing about tshirts and xrays .I started walking through the alphabet: A- and B-list , C-clamp , D-Day , F-hole , G-spot, H-bomb. And, of course, e- words, all hyphenated: e-book , e-commerce , e-reader , e-tail , e-zine . Keeping the hyphen in e-mail seems a logical choice.
For whatever reason, though, e-mail quickly became email as America went online.
The title of the most popular post on this blog, How to e-mail a professor, has always had a hyphen. It’s old school.
Related posts
Bad hyphens, unhelpful abbreviations : “Every generation hyphenates the way it wants to” : Got hyphens? : The Hammacher Schlemmer crazy making hyphen shortage problem : Living on hyphens : Mr. Hyphen and Mr. Faulkner : One more from Mr. Hyphen : Phrasal-adjective punctuation
[Mr. Hyphen: protagonist of Edward N. Teall’s Meet Mr. Hyphen (And Put Him in His Place) (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1937), the subject of several of these hyphen-centric posts.]
comments: 9
I am also staying with the hyphen, but I fear it won't be long now. I was convinced by your list until I picked up where you left off: iTunes, JSTOR, Kmart, and (I know this one doesn't count) llama.
I couldn’t think of anything for i , hyphen or no hyphen. But the Apple names aren’t really words created in the wild; they don’t have to follow any rules. (Nor do MacBook and all camel-cased product names.) I always assumed JSTOR was an acronym, since it looks like one. But as I just found out, it stands for Journal Storage . Kmart used to have a hyphen. I still spell Wal-Mart (if I have to) with a hyphen. Maybe I should start spelling iPhone with a hyphen. :)
"E" (and to an extent "i") has become a prefix, one that represents not an abbreviation (like G-spot) or a reference to a letter-shape (F-hole) but an actual semantic addition to a word, the way that "un-" does in "unforgettable." So you can make up new words like "ecard," "e-commerce," etc., with or without using a hyphen, and we understand immediately what the modification implies. ("Etail" is a special case, because there we drop the original initial consonant.) There may be a case for preserving the hyphen where clarity is an issue, but in the long run it's probably going to disappear.
Didn’t the e begin as a stand-in for electronic?
In 2009 Garner’s Modern American Usage found e-mail “five times as common as email” in print. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (1990–2012) has e-mail as far more common. But I too suspect that the hyphen may disappear.
It did begin as "electronic" (at least I assume it did), but I think it now simply functions as a marker for "things web-related," since the "electronic" aspect of our lives is now taken for granted. I suspect future generations, if they still use it, will have little awareness of the "electronic" origin.
And there's the name "eBay" as a model — even though that was apparently originally a shortened form of "Echo Bay."
Now I see what you mean.
I just did some looking: in 1998 the American Dialect Society called e- a “hyphenated prefix” and voted it “Word (or perhaps Lexical Entry) of the Year.”
“Now I see what you mean”: in other words, what you first wrote. I missed the importance of become .
Hm. A random thought: maybe the meaning of the prefix "e" will expand to mean anything web related...
So, for instance "eirritating" could mean something that annoys you on the Internet.
That sounds einteresting!
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