Weekly Writers: Thoughts On Using "E"

The ecstasy of punctuation

Here’s the Weekly Writers Monday post. Thanks to my paid subscribers, this post is open to everyone. I’m going to take a break from writing about publishing, and have a digression into punctuation instead.

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Thoughts On Using "E"

E-book, e-Book, EBook, ebook, e-book, E-Book, eBook, Ebook? Many words have the letter ‘e’ prefixed nowadays, denoting ‘electronic’, but there seems to be confusion about the standard way of dealing with that letter. I decided to write this to clarify the underlying rules for using the prefix ‘e’ with other words, since we in the UK have no equivalent of L’Académie Française.

When you break it down, this question of grammar only has two elements. Whether to use a hyphen or not, and whether (if capitalisation is needed) to capitalise the first or the second letter.

Hyphens

Over time two words become associated together, and eventually make a commitment, proudly and publicly joining themselves with a hyphen to prevent any ambiguity or confusion. Then, when everyone knows they are together, the hyphen tends to disappear. The coupling is established. So we now talk about handrails (not hand-rails), and overcoats (not over-coats).

So the existence of a hyphen generally depends on the level of establishment of a word.

Hence over time ‘electronic mail’ became ‘e-mail’; for many it is now so well established that it is ‘email’, and is still pronounced correctly as ‘ee-mail’, never ‘eh-mail’, even though the hyphen is gone.

However, there is one case where the hyphen stays useful – when separating vowels, to prevent them becoming a diphthong or affecting the pronunciation (and possibly meaning) – such as e-assessment, e-economy, e-assignments. ‘Eassessment’ just looks wrong. So keeping the hyphen is always useful, but not necessary in every case.

Okay, that’s established the fact that a term like e-book is simply a hyphenated compound noun where one of the words was truncated. That doesn’t change the rules that govern capitalisation.

Capitalisation

A hyphenated compound noun like e-book is a standard hyphenated word. The rules of capitalisation don’t suddenly become complicated. When a capital is needed (e.g. at the start of a sentence) you capitalise the first letter. When one isn’t needed, you don’t use a capital letter. This is the same as constructions such as ‘single-minded’ – it is the ‘s’ that is capitalised when a capital is needed, not the ‘m’.

So capitalising the first letter is standard English; capitalising the second letter is incorrect.

Why is that basic mistake so common then? When people write eBooks or eJournals they are using names like eBay or iPad as a template. But that’s following a pattern with a completely different purpose, just because they look the same on the surface.

iPhone and the like are registered trademarks/brand names, and they change capitalisation (and mangle the language) as part of that - Camel Case shouldn’t be used for standard nouns. It’s a case of misapplying the rules for one thing onto another. In standard English, when a capital is needed, we don’t make it the second letter of a word, it is always the first. Ignoring that basic rule looks ignorant and perpetuates a misunderstanding. If you have ever cringed at ‘Fone Warehouse’ or ‘Petz’ then I’m sure you will agree that commercial mis-spellings shouldn’t be a basis for language rules.

Conclusion

If the word with an e-prefix is a recent combination/contraction then use a hyphen. If it is so established that the hyphen is no longer needed to aid pronunciation, then it can be dropped (but that is optional: it would not be incorrect to leave the hyphen in). When a capital is needed it is always the first letter that is capitalised.

So, is it e-book/E-book, or ebook/Ebook? It depends on your subjective judgement on whether the word is now as established as email and can lose the hyphen or not. So, either form is acceptable, as long as you are consistent (which is the key to any stylistic choice, and why authors choose or create a style guide for reference). A decade from now, the answer might be different.