Email lost hyphen

Yesterday, a change was made to the English language media style guide : from now on, the English-language media are advised to write the abbreviation for “e-mail” as email, not e-mail. The hyphen is "a relic of old times, when Internet technology needed to be explained very carefully to readers."

This is not the first step in the modernization of technological terms. Last year, the AP Stylebook editors decided to replace the “Web site” with “website”, and also made another 41 changes , including “smart phone” is now written in two words, “e-reader” with a hyphen. The definitions of the words “trending”, “retweet” and “otfrendit”, as well as the most popular acronyms from adolescent Internet slang have been added to the dictionary of social media. Among them are ROFL, BRB, G2G and POS (“parent over shoulder”: parent over shoulder).

The Russian language is also changing, although there is no “stylistic guide” in RuNet that would record these changes. Here are some examples of transformations:

Internet, Web (1997) → Internet (2002) → Internet, Web (2006)
Offline (1998) → offline (2003) → offline (2008)
Internet Browser (1995) → browser (2000)
Handheld computer (1998) → handheld computer, PDA (2003) → smartphone (2008)
Search the Internet (1998) → google (2009)