[ih] Any suggestions for first uses of "e-mail" or "email"?
Vint Cerf
vint at google.com
Fri Jul 24 02:21:10 PDT 2015
Oxford English Dictionary looking for early usage of the term "email"
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/07/oed-appeals-email/
Before email was email it was electronic mail. Although
the shorter form is by far the more common name today, the full
form electronic mail of course came first (otherwise how would
anybody know what the 'e' meant?). It was only as people became
more familiar with the system that they could shorten this to
the snappier email. E- is now used in this way to form a
plethora of technology words such as e-commerce and e-book, but
email is where it all began. The OED currently has a first
quotation for electronic mail in this sense from 1975; the
shorter email is first attested four years later, in 1979.
Although this doesn't seem like a very large gap in time, it
seems unlikely that the 1979 quotation represents the coinage of
email, taken as it is from a professional journal: 1979
Electronics 7 June 63 (heading) Postal Service pushes ahead with
E-mail.
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