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Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Email, not e-mail

Should it be e-mail or email? No less an authority than Don Knuth says “email”.

 

Newly coined nonce words of English 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.”  http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email.html

 

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