How major style guides rule on "email"
Once routinely hyphenated, the unhyphenated form is now universal across major English style guides.
The disagreement on "email" is an example of modernization of formerly hyphenated compounds, the category of style-guide differences that most often confuses copy editors and creates inconsistency across long documents. Below is a guide-by-guide breakdown, drawn directly from the published editions cited.
| Style guide | Preferred form |
|---|---|
| AP Stylebook (2024–2025 Edition) | |
| Chicago Manual of Style | |
| MLA Handbook | |
| APA Publication Manual | |
| Merriam-Webster Dictionary |
What the divergence actually means
The shift toward "email" largely consolidated around 2011, when major American style guides revised their entries to reflect actual published usage. Before that point, editorial style on this word was unsettled, and house styles split along whether they prioritized etymological transparency or contemporary convention. Source: AP Stylebook (2024–2025 Edition)
The APA Publication Manual aligns with AP and Chicago on "email", though APA generally addresses spelling questions only when they intersect with statistical reporting or technical psychology vocabulary. Where the manual is silent, APA defers to Merriam-Webster as its standard reference. Source: APA Publication Manual, 7th Edition
Merriam-Webster lists "email", which serves as the lexicographic baseline for U.S. style decisions. Because Merriam-Webster's entries reflect aggregated published usage rather than editorial preference, when a guide says "follow Merriam-Webster", as APA does, that effectively delegates the call to whichever spelling has dominated the published corpus. Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Garner's Modern English Usage classifies the "email" / "e-mail" pair on its Language-Change Index, a five-stage scale measuring whether a once-disputed form has been accepted into Standard English. For modernization of formerly hyphenated compounds, Garner's typically rates the dominant form at Stage 4 ("ubiquitous but objected to by traditionalists") or Stage 5 ("fully accepted"). Source: Garner's Modern English Usage, 5th Edition
Practical guidance for editors
For working writers, the practical rule is straightforward: in journalism, follow AP; in academic writing in the humanities, follow MLA or Chicago; in social-science publishing, follow APA; in book publishing, follow Chicago. When no house style applies, Merriam-Webster's main entry is the safest default. The differences across these guides on "email" reflect not disagreement about correctness but different audiences and editorial pressures.
Editorial context
The Google Books Ngrams corpus provides compelling evidence of email's dominance over e-mail, with the unhyphenated form crossing the hyphenated variant around 2008 in American English and slightly later in British English. This shift reflects broader trends in compound modernization, where frequent terms shed hyphens for efficiency once semantic fusion occurs, much like "notebook" eclipsing "note-book" decades earlier. By the early 2010s, email comprised over 90 percent of occurrences in published books, pressuring style arbiters to align with evolving norms rather than prescribe against them. For instance, consider The team sends daily email updates to all subscribers, where the seamless integration aids readability in digital contexts. Corpus data underscores that while formal guides converged on email, informal registers and legacy texts preserve e-mail sporadically, highlighting usage's lead over editorial fiat in language change.
Cross-references
For the dictionary entry, frequency data, and pronunciation of email, see the main word page. For other style-guide spelling decisions in this category, browse all style-guide spelling rulings.