<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto"><div>Hi Vint,</div><div><br></div><div>Something vaguely related to came up recently in the context of RFC boilerplate: the question of whether the authors' section should label an author's electronic mail address as "email" or "e-mail". (I think actually the issue of the hyphen was a tangent from whatever the original question was.)</div><div><br></div><div>Interesting that having cited the 1979 reference that includes the reference, the blog post omits it in its commentary. </div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Joe (in favour of hyphens in this instance)</div><div><br>On Jul 24, 2015, at 11:33, Vint Cerf <<a href="mailto:vint@google.com">vint@google.com</a>> wrote:<br><br></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">http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/07/oed-appeals-email/</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>
</div></blockquote><blockquote type="cite"><div><span>_______</span><br><span>internet-history mailing list</span><br><span><a href="mailto:internet-history@postel.org">internet-history@postel.org</a></span><br><span><a href="http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history">http://mailman.postel.org/mailman/listinfo/internet-history</a></span><br><span>Contact <a href="mailto:list-owner@postel.org">list-owner@postel.org</a> for assistance.</span><br></div></blockquote></body></html>