Electronic Mail - what's the abbreviation?

[AWB]

I'm looking for a consensus.
Is it: [list=1] e-mail
e-Mail
Email
email
or anything else you can think of?[/list=1]

[labradorian]

C'est courriel.

[Arken]

5. Waster of far too much time

[SuperNerd]

I believe the commonly accepted form around here is: 6. eMail.

[Arnold Winkelried]

labradorian,

Est-ce que tu viens d'inventer ça, ou bien est-ce que le mot "courriel" est vraiment utilisé pour "e-mail" en français?

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La franchise ne consiste pas à dire tout ce que l'on pense, mais à penser tout ce que l'on dit.
H. de Livry

[Nickrz]

"eMail" the commonly accepted form? Speak for yourself. Why complicate things with hyphens and caps? Type email and leave it at that.

[Patty O'Furniture]

I prefer to use "e-mail", but most spelling checkers try to correct me, so I have evolved to using "email" and they leave me alone.

[Earl Snake-Hips Tucker]

How about e{:-Dfmail?

[putrid]

My vote is for e-mail but, due to natural evolution, I dare say it will soon be uniformly email. I guess I should be ahead of the bunch for once and switch my vote to email.

[SuperNerd]

I stand corrected. msWord says eMail is misspelled, but email is okay.

Sorry.

[Ringo]

The computer magazines seem to have settled on e-mail. That is easily the form I most often see.

[tanstaafl]

I've seen e@mail as well.

[Lord Jim]

I use almost all of them, except that funny looking "e@mail". I prefer "email". At the top of this page, they use "Email" but most of the words are capitalized. In the FAQ section, they use "E-mail", with the capitalization intentional. Seems to me, there isn't a wrong way to write it.

[Cessandra]

Arnold -- you make me so mad! :)
I try so hard to convince myself that I can understand French, and you have to go and prove me wrong!

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Cessandra

Why sex is better than religion: No need to rest on Sundays!

[Satan]

The spell checker in Word claims it should be e-mail with a lowercase "e."

But it also interprets zzz as sex, so I don't know if we want Bill Gates to be an authority on matters such as this.

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Yer pal,
Satan

[handy]

MS Word always gives me E-mail, which isn't one of your selections.

I do think the right way is E-Mail as its
an abbreviation for electronic mail.

Can always be right with that one.

[Arnold Winkelried]

Sorry, Cessandra. I like to practice my french whenever I can.

My message said:

labradorian,

Did you just invent that, or is the word courriel really used for "e-mail" in french?



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Quand les talons claquent, l'esprit se vide.
Maréchal Lyautey

[Beruang]

A couple months ago I asked Jesse Sheidlower, former author of Random House Word of the Day on the Web, and currently a Principal Editor for the Oxford English Dictionary. His specialty is new and slang words.

His repsonse: e-mail and email are both common enough to be considered "standard," though the hyphen may have a slight edge.

[Diceman]

Beatle's right. The computer industry has definitely settled on "e-mail". I use that spelling because it seems like the most natural spelling. I wouldn't use "email" because it looks like it should be pronounced "em-ail". I know some people don't like the hyphen in there, but I'm not one of them.

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"I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms." -The Secret of Monkey Island

[whitetho]

Cessandra protested: I try so hard to convince myself that I can understand French, and you have to go and prove me wrong!

C'mon Cessandra, this is the Internet age--anyone who can cut-and-paste can translate French. I ran Mr. Winkelried's sentence through babelfish.altavista.com and it came up with a very credible translation of: Have you just invented that, or well the word "courriel" is really used for " French e-mail "?

Note that Bablefish didn't recognize courriel as being a French word.

[handy]

Shucks, use any form of 'email' as long as you are consistent with it. I know a web site that uses a few variations of it on the site but they should not.


'Internet' is an acrynomn, isnt it? Ah, I long for the old debate on if its got a big 'I' or a small one.

[labradorian]

Babelfish? You can get better translations throwing darts at a dictionary.

Courriel is very common in written documents, though I often hear French speakers using "email". Altavista turns up over 60,000 hits, although there are about a million for email and e-mail in French-language web pages.

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Dee da dee da dee dee do do / Dee ba ditty doh / Deedle dooby doo ba dee um bee ooby / Be doodle oodle doodle dee doh http://members.xoom.com/labradorian/

[omni-not]

Bien sûr, nous avons aussi l'équivalent littéral "courrier électronique", mais "courriel" a de plus en plus droit de cité, du moins au Canada. En France, où tout ce qui sonne anglais fait chic, on dit régulièrement "e-mail" qui, dans la bouche du Francais moyen, devient "i-mêle", mais c'est une autre histoire...

Something for you to chew on, fair Cessandra :)

[Crystalguy]

C'mon, guys, I listen to enough of that French-Canadian jive down here in Southern Florida-----don't make me suffer any more than I have to.

[Edward J Cunningham]

Does it really matter how you say "e-mail" in French when over 90% of global internet traffic is in English?

[NanoByte]

Well, see, ya gotta put that little hoary-zontal line in there, 'cause electrons is negativvious -- an' that's not a hyphen; it's a minus sign. An' '@mail', the way I figger, should be 'snail mail', 'counta the spiral. Don' care wutcher OED should say, ner yer word-pro-sister.

But what does the Académie have to say about the appropriate French word for electronic mail?

Ray ('You got a @/" up your mail.')

[Kyla]

Hm, I can understand the French stuff pretty well (I didn't quite get Arnold's post, but I completely understand Omni-not's) and I've never taken a single French class in my life. Please don't ask me to write in French though!

Re the OP: I usually write email, but e-mail looks okay to me too. Anything else looks kinda silly to me, especially e@mail and eMail.



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~Harborina

"Don't Do It."