[ih] Any suggestions for first uses of "e-mail" or "email"?

[Joe Abley]

Hi Vint,

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.)

Interesting that having cited the 1979 reference that includes the
reference, the blog post omits it in its commentary.


Joe (in favour of hyphens in this instance)

On Jul 24, 2015, at 11:33, Vint Cerf <vint at google.com> wrote:

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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