Preferences, "e-mail" vs "email"

by Bob Cunningham
 

Postings to AUE for the period February 1996 through 16 April 1999 have been searched to obtain a count of each of four ways of writing /'i:meIl/.

The search was performed with the Agent Newsreader. The data reside in folders in Agent, one folder for each month. The Agent Global Search function was used to perform the searches. In order to try to avoid counting postings that discussed per se the various ways of writing /'i:meIl/, postings that contained any of the four ways in the subject line were excluded from the count.

For example, for the count of postings containing 'Email', the following search string was used:

     body:Email and not subject:email and not subject:e-mail

(The logic used by Agent is such that if a search string contains any uppercase character, the search is case sensitive, while if the search string contains only lowercase characters, the search is case insensitive. Thus, the search-string element 'not subject:email' excludes both 'email' and 'Email'.)

The following table shows the results of the searches:

Counts of spelling preferences
Period Total
Number of
Postings
Number containing
e-mail email E-mail Email
Feb 96 thru Jun 96 17850 760 442 123 140
Jul 96 thru Dec 96 25669 896 1051 133 151
Jan 97 thru Jun 97 30720 1406 1482 167 277
Jul 97 thru Dec 97 37016 3184 1788 223 138
Jan 98 thru Jun 98 49911 4815 2791 528 268
Jul 98 thru Dec 98 56814 3527 3950 197 135
Jan 99 thru 4-16-99 35299 1389 1255 88 35
Totals 253279 15977 12759 1459 1144