Email vs. E-mail at Wired

[Lynne Murphy]

>We're also left with "econ" (ugh).  There's also (OK, this is pretty
>marginal, I admit) a poker variant called "evap" ['iy-vaep].  And,
>less marginally, "emu" (the animal, not the electronically
>transmitted Greek letter) and "equal".
>
>larry

Yes, but this is really just an amusement to think of e-words,
because e-mail is in a different category than the rest, since it's
really a compound, and thus is subject to a different set of stress
rules and such.  I haven't been following this thread closely, but I
think the reason to put a hyphen in e-mail is because we're not used
to seeing compounds with one-letter constituents, so email is likely
to be misread.  But, of course, if enough people spell it that way
(and they probably already do--my spell-checker likes email--but not
spellchecker!), folks'll get used to it (and probably already have).

Now that I've brought it up (if someone else already hadn't) I
suppose we can argue about whether e-mail is a compound, or whether
it's word with a prefix.  But I've cast my vote.

Lynne
--
M. Lynne Murphy
Lecturer in Linguistics
School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 3AN    UK
phone:  +44(0)1273-678844
fax:    +44(0)1273-671320