At WSJ, it's now email

Style change at the Wall Street Journal -- the hyphen is being dropped from e-mail. The new email style begins May 1, according to the monthly Style & Substance internal bulletin on WSJ style that can be found online.

Other e- words will stay with the hyphen, such as e-commerce.

In noting the change, WSJ's keeper of the stylebook, Paul Martin, quotes Ray Tomlinson, "the father of network email" from Tomlinson's Web site: "It's time to stop putting a hyphen in email ... before we exhaust the world's supply of hyphens." Martin notes that the Journal's tech columnist, Walt Mossberg, says that in the tech industry, "They simply call it mail."


Another interesting twist. While the AP, which had been using best seller as two words, recently went to best-seller in all uses, the Journal is moving the other way, now making the noun best seller and the adjective best-seller. As I said in the earlier post about AP's change, why not just go with Webester's first-listed bestseller and be done with it?