When words become one

In 1996, Lady Diana Spencer and Charles, Prince of Wales, divorced; Ella Fitzgerald, the great jazz singer, died, and Dolly, a sheep, was cloned. Oh, and I bought a copy of a book titled Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age.

Back then, Wired was a must-read magazine filled with stories about this thing called the Internet, which people also wrote as "internet". I wanted to learn the "right" way to write such words, so I bought Wired Style. On page 84, it says, "When in Doubt, Close it Up". What does that mean? Well, here's a Wired Style example: "We know from experience that new terms often start as two words, then become hyphenated, and eventually end up as one word. Go there now." And Wired Style went there with "email", which it wrote as one word, no hyphen, and defined as "a telegraph, a memo, and a palaver rolled into one".

I thought about that last week when I heard that the Associated Press had decided to change "Web site" to "website", without a hyphen. This is how it tweeted its decision to "close it up":

Click on the image to make it bigger

Here at Spotlight, we decided long ago to write "website", too, but what about e-mail/email? I asked our senior copy editor, Mike Pilewski, and here's his reply:

Our references allow both the use and the non-use of the hyphen. The trend among native speakers is, and has always been, towards shorter words. However, the hyphen in "e-mail" continues to be widely used, and we retain it for reasons of appearance and aesthetics, as well as to ensure that the word remains easy to identify and pronounce. The advantage becomes clearer when dealing with other "e-things", such as e-cards, e-cash, e-payments, e-trading, e-zines and now even e-cigarettes. Etymology is a further reason: "e-" for "electronic" is distinguished from the Latin prefix "e", meaning "out of", found in words like emerge, emanate, emit, and emotion.

Our German readers should note that in English, "mail" without an "e" usually still refers to non-electronic mail. You may receive e-mail or an e-mail on your computer, but mail comes in a truck that arrives at your house.

If Mike ever gets the time to write Spotlight Style, I'll buy a copy of it.