News

Dedham, MA
January 26, 2005

Email or e-mail—to hyphenate or not?

A new poll could settle the question, “Should we spell it, email or e-mail?”

The SamPoll asks people to vote their preference at SamPoll.com. “When 10,000 votes are tallied, we will announce the results to the e-world (or eworld),” says Sam Levine, director of the Internet poll.

Think the hyphen makes no difference? At Apple’s website, if you do a search of products, services and features by typing “e-mail” you get “about 179” results. But if you drop the hyphen, you will get “about 1,710” results! Steve Jobs, call your office.

At Yahoo! if you search using the hyphenated spelling, you get 433 million possibilities. If you drop the hyphen, you get 509 million. That’s a difference of 76 million.

At Google, it is even more dramatic. With the hyphen you get almost 68 million results. But if you drop the hyphen, you get nearly ten times as many—650 million!

If you visit America Online and click on “Press Center,” a search for “email” related news releases will produce 203 articles. But if you add the hyphen, you’ll get 336 articles.

Don’t ask Bill Gates how it should be spelled. On the official “Bill Gates’ Website,” the heading “Executive E-mail” (with a hyphen) is shortly after followed by “Executive Email” (without a hyphen).

Ray Tomlinson, “the father of network email,” says on his website, “it’s time to stop putting a hyphen in ‘email’…before we exhaust the world’s supply of hyphens.”

Some companies may have a vested interest in the outcome of this debate. eBay goes hyphen-less in its own name and, according to David Smith in the president’s office, “as a general rule eBay does not hyphenate the word email.” Perhaps they don’t want confused consumers looking for e-Bay.

“At first, without a hyphen, ‘email’ looked like a typo. Many still think ‘ecommerce’ looks strange,” says SamPoll’s Sam Levine, co-founder and COO of IntelliReach, a software company that manages, archives and protects email (or e-mail) for corporate clients. “One side argues that we should not waste millions of man-seconds adding an antiquated punctuation mark to spell a word that is all about saving time. The other side contends that such simplification could lead to dropping apostrophes from words like ‘don’t’ and eventually result in making our language too mechanistic and impersonal.”

SamPoll.com provides arguments on both sides of the question, and asks for a yes or no. There is also an option for people to offer additional reasons.

Sam Levine says he will remain neutral on the question. “I don’t want people suspecting bias and questioning the validity of the poll. Personally, I have no stake in the outcome. Whatever the e-community (or ecommunity) decides is fine with me. But let’s settle it.”

For more information, email (or e-mail) Todd Domke at domke0307@aol.com or call Todd Domke & Associates at 781-562-0600.