materi

Spelling of this term is disputed. Many now regard the word "email" as a perfectly valid and formal word in its own right, and regard the abbreviation "e-mail" as anachronistic. The word "email" is recognized as a valid English word in all major dictionaries however the e-mail abbreviation is often still used. Despite the word "email" being used in common English the computer industry and web sites still use multiple variants of the term.

Usage examples from prominent style guides:

• Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), 15th edition^[1][2]: e-mail. CMS is widely referenced as the standard^[3] for technical writing and journalism style guidelines in the United States.
• Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications e-mail, explicitly saying "maintain the hyphenation". O'Reilly and Amazon.com assert that "many top notch technical companies, writers, and editors consider the Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications to be a standard in the industry."^[4]
• IEEE Computer Society recommends hyphenation in e-mail, deferring to the Chicago Manual of Style explicitly^[5], and using it in their own materials^[6]
• Associated Press (Global News Network) Style Guide^[7]: e-mail

Usage examples from prominent companies include:

• e-mail: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, Microsoft^[8], HP^[9], IBM^[10], Dell^[11], Amazon.com^[12], CNET^[13]
• email: Google, Apple, Yahoo!, eBay^[14]
• Inconsistent: Intel^[15][16]

The original RFC definitions for the SMTP standard^[17], the POP standard^[18], and the IMAP standard^[19] contain neither e-mail nor email, instead using the terms mail and message. Authors of later RFCs for SMTP use the term email (in addition to mail and message).^[20] However, the latest RFC for POP^[21] uses mail and message.

Hyphens sometimes disappear from words originally coined with them after the term has come into widespread use,^[22] although many of those words would still have the same pronunciation following normal English rules, such as web-site vs. website, non-zero vs. nonzero.^{[citation needed]} In contrast, email (without a hyphen) following normal rules is not necessarily the same pronunciation as e-mail.^{[citation needed]} Without the hyphen but keeping the same pronunciation, it would not follow pronunciation patterns of typical English words starting with em, such as emphasis or ember.^{[citation needed]} Even the common English words that start with ema (dictionary search) have a short and/or soft e sound: emaciated, emanate, emasculate, emancipate^[23], rather than a separate syllable for a long-e^[24] sound as in e-mail.^[25][26]

The sixth edition of the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary removed hyphens from some 16,000 words that previously employed them^[27] although many of those were not merging the words, but removals that resulted in splitting original words into two words ("fig leaf", "hobby horse", "test tube", "ice cream").^[28]

Although e-mail was originally treated as a mass noun by early network users ("You've got more email than you can handle"), the public has chosen to make e-mail a count noun instead ("You've got more emails than you can handle").^{[citation needed]} To some, this count-noun usage is still discouraged where possible.^{[citation needed]}