E-mail vs Email – AP editors introduce new change

This is from Grammar Girl‘s weekly newsletter:

 

You’ve Got “E-mail” or “Email”?

Last week, I was at the American Copy Editors Society meeting where the editors of the Associated Press stylebook created a stir by announcing a change in their recommended spelling: “e-mail” is now “email.”

The social media website Mashable implied that the change is long overdue, running the story with the headline “AP Stylebook finally changes ‘e-mail’ to ’email.'” On the other hand, the New York Timesannounced that they’ll stick with “e-mail.”

What this shows is that using a hyphen in “e-mail” is a style choice, and Mashable is more permissive than the Associated Press, which is more permissive than the New York Times when it comes to language change.

I asked the AP Stylebook editors why they made the change, and they said most of their writers already turn in articles with the “email” spelling, and copy editors found “e-mail” increasingly difficult to police. They emphasized that they don’t consider themselves to be on the leading edge of language change; instead, they “bow to common usage.”

Do you use “email” or “e-mail”? How do you feel about the recent additions of “LOL” and “OMG” to the Oxford English Dictionary?