4 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2022
    1. Giants that prefer the hyphenated spelling—Merriam-Webster, The Chicago Manual of Style, and The New Yorker, have a good reason for doing so. E-mail is a compound noun, made out of two words—“electronic” and “mail.” The e in e-mail is an abbreviation for “electronic,” and it’s used in a lot of other words as well—e-commerce, e-learning, and e-business, for example. There are also other compound nouns formed from an abbreviation and a noun, like the H-bomb, which is short for hydrogen bomb. The general rule of hyphenation in compound words that combine a single letter (or a number) and a word is to hyphenate them. So, based on tradition, e-mail is the correct way to do it.
  2. Apr 2020