Talk:email

Countability

Is this countable? Can you receive two emails?

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(countable; also email message) A message sent by this system. I am searching through my emails.

Second definition under nouns, hun.

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I think "email" as in "mail" / "electronic letters" etc has both countable and uncountable uses. Both "I looked through my old emails" and "I looked through my old email" are used. Personally I use only the latter. In fact the word's ancestor, "mail" can only be used uncountably. "I looked through my mails" sound utterly wrong.

Now both "mail" and "email" would have an uncountable, though I prefer to think of them as "absolute" sense as in "(e)mail system": "I received something by (e)mail". — 203.222.154.2 06:29, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

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Preferences aside, 'mail' is uncountable as 'traffic' is uncountable. Why is 'electronic mail' suddenly countable, aside from a bad habit creeping into language? (I'm trying hard to avoid words like Provincial and Rural)

Email vs. E-mail

• <Jun-Dai 17:28, 9 Jun 2005 (UTC)>

    As is the case with many of the heated discussions here, the issue of email vs. e-mail gets at the heart of what the Wiktionary is supposed to be. Email is clearly the commoner of the two forms, though not by an especially large margin, I'd wager. On the other hand, I've only ever seen e-mail prescribed or required. Should commonness be our sole or main criterion for determining which of a pair of words should be the main entry, or would it be prudent to also include some concept of acceptability?

    In any case, even if we do stick with email, we ought to have a usage comment indicating that the form is prescribed against or unacceptable in certain contexts.

    More importantly, we should have some basis for which ever decision we go for. Dictionaries, print publications, etc. To begin with:

  • m-w.com: e-mail only (email brings up a "not in dictionary" page.
  • dictionary.com: e-mail and email (e-mail first)
  • The New Yorker: uses only e-mail
  • The Chicago Manual of Style: uses only e-mail

    As much as I'd like to move this article to e-mail, I'll only do it if no one responds, or if I get a favorable response.

  </Jun-Dai>

The OED allows "email", marking it only as colloquial in the 1989 edition. I think this spelling should now be regarded as alternative, rather than non-standard. Though I, personally, always write "e-mail", I would not condemn anyone who omits the hyphen, because the same objection could apply to many other words defined in Wiktionary without a hyphen when I would still insist on a hyphen! Usage changes! I was taught to write "to-day", and still prefer this spelling, but it has become obsolete in the last fifty years. Dbfirs 16:14, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Edited by: Pianosa 22:40, 9 October 2010 (UTC)

Adjective

<Jun-Dai 20:54, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)>

I'm pretty sure this was a joke:

===Adjective===
'''email'''

====Proununciation====
*[[IPA]]: /eɪˈmaɪ/
*[[SAMPA]]: /<tt>eI"maI</tt>/

#A moderate bluish-green to greenish-blue.
#:''I don't believe that email skirt suits you.''

I removed it. It was contributed by an IP user, and I can find no reference to it in a dictionary (granted, it is hard to search for). Please reinstate if you feel this was removed in error.</Jun-Dai>

I have seen it as such in an unabridged dictionary, and it is defined that way in the official Scripps Howard Spelling Bee Paideia Dictionary, so I think it is safe to say that that should stay.

Proof

"In contrast, the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary A-M lists "email" (1993) on p. 802. The real killer was Webster's Third International Dictionary (1993) defining email, p. 738, as "enamel . . a moderate bluish green to greenish blue that is lighter than gendarme . . . " Perhaps, this running together of "email" could be confused with a paint color." — This comment was unsigned.

I can see adding a {{misspelling of|enamel}} perhaps, but the color? No, not without attestation that meets Wiktionary's criteria. (See {{nosecondary}}.) --Connel MacKenzie 07:09, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

The OED has both the "enamel" meaning (from French), and the electronic communication meaning. Dbfirs 16:14, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Requests for verification - kept

Kept. See archived discussion of July 2008. 06:08, 25 July 2008 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Requests for verification - senses failed

See this discussion.

Can it be an adjective?

In a phrase like “email message”, isn't email an adjective?

No, it's still a noun. It's what they call attributive use. If it were an adjective, you could use words like more or most with it. It's like "privacy policy", which is a policy about privacy, not a policy that's privacy. Chuck Entz (talk) 04:02, 7 March 2013 (UTC)

I agree that it's attributive, but for the purposes of parsing (separate from glossing) it still occupies the grammatical slot of "adjective", being a word or phrase that precedes a noun and gives it a more specific meaning.

Whether or not "adjective" should include attributive nouns isn't really relevant. Given that “email something” was originally the predominant usage, and is actually used here in the explanatory text of the noun meanings, it should be documented; it's merely a question of whether the subheading should be "adjective", or "attributive noun", or something else. Martin Kealey (talk) 02:25, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

Email as a proper noun in Australia

When I mentioned "email" to my father in 1985, he was a bit confused, because to him it was the name of a company from which he purchased electricity meters and related equipment. Martin Kealey (talk) 02:35, 28 April 2017 (UTC)

email (verb)

"To send an email or emails to." -> "To send one or more emails to." ? --NoToleranceForIntolerance (talk) 20:54, 24 July 2017 (UTC)

My inbox used to allow only 50 MB of email at a time until last year, when they upgraded it to 2 GBs.

Is this sentence factual? Is there actually a provider that allows up to 2 GBs of attachments at a time? Otherwise the number should be changed to something that can be sourced. --2001:16B8:31DF:5400:88EA:B6DB:16A1:1491 13:17, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

I don't think it is referring to 2 GB attached to one single e-mail. Certainly you could have a mailbox with unlimited quota, so yeah, possible. Equinox ◑ 13:20, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

"Transferring messages" -- but mainly human-focused

"Transferring messages" is rather vague, as this could mean things like UDP, TCP, RPC that are control messages seen only by cmoputers. Yet email is usually (not always) messages written and read by human beings. So maybe the def could be improved. Equinox ◑ 17:00, 20 June 2023 (UTC)