Oxford English Dictionary looking for early usage of the term "email"
http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/07/oed-appeals-email/ Before email was email it was electronic mail. Although the shorter form is by far the more common name today, the full form electronic mail of course came first (otherwise how would anybody know what the 'e' meant?). It was only as people became more familiar with the system that they could shorten this to the snappier email. E- is now used in this way to form a plethora of technology words such as e-commerce and e-book, but email is where it all began. The OED currently has a first quotation for electronic mail in this sense from 1975; the shorter email is first attested four years later, in 1979. Although this doesn't seem like a very large gap in time, it seems unlikely that the 1979 quotation represents the coinage of email, taken as it is from a professional journal: 1979 Electronics 7 June 63 (heading) Postal Service pushes ahead with E-mail. - - - Their time frame seems to be about right, since earlier the colloquial usage tended to be "messages" or more often simply "mail" -- with the "e" understood. Later the term "e-mail" started popping up in the press and of course now both that and "email" are still used interchangeably. --Lauren-- Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren Founder: - Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org - PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com _______________________________________________ pfir mailing list http://lists.pfir.org/mailman/listinfo/pfir
