Preferences, "e-mail" vs "email"

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