<html><body bgcolor="#FFFFFF"><div>I believe there was considerable discussion of this on the <a href="http://sigcis.org">sigcis.org</a> list back when the guy claimed to have invented at a young age. I think the <a href="http://sigcis.org">sigcis.org</a> archive can be accessed without a password.<br><br>Sent from my iPad</div><div><br>On Jul 24, 2015, at 5:21 AM, Vint Cerf <<a href="mailto:vint@google.com">vint@google.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></div><div></div><blockquote type="cite"><div><div dir="ltr"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px">Oxford English Dictionary looking for early usage of the term "email"</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><a href="http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/07/oed-appeals-email/" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank" style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><a href="http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/07/oed-appeals-email/">http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/07/oed-appeals-email/</a></a><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> Before email was email it was electronic mail. Although</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> the shorter form is by far the more common name today, the full</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> form electronic mail of course came first (otherwise how would</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> anybody know what the 'e' meant?). It was only as people became</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> more familiar with the system that they could shorten this to</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> the snappier email. E- is now used in this way to form a</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> plethora of technology words such as e-commerce and e-book, but</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> email is where it all began. The OED currently has a first</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> quotation for electronic mail in this sense from 1975; the</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> shorter email is first attested four years later, in 1979.</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> Although this doesn't seem like a very large gap in time, it</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> seems unlikely that the 1979 quotation represents the coinage of</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> email, taken as it is from a professional journal: 1979</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> Electronics 7 June 63 (heading) Postal Service pushes ahead with</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> E-mail.</span><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><br style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"><span style="font-size:12.8000001907349px"> - - -</span><br></div>
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