Ashley Mergen asks: "What is the proper plural of e-mail? When referring to snail mail, you would not say, 'I received a hundred mails,' but rather, 'I received a hundred pieces of mail' or 'I received a hundred mailings.' However, when referring to e-mail, one would say, 'I received a hundred e-mails.' Correct?"



The plural form of e-mail is, indeed, e-mails, even though there's no corresponding plural of mail as mails. This mismatch has rankled seekers of grammatical consistency over the years, but it has nonetheless settled into standard usage.



First some terminology. Nouns that can form plurals are called "count nouns." Mail, historically, is what is known as a "mass noun" — a noun that can't be enumerated and thus resists pluralization, much like mud and milk, patience and poppycock. Some nouns can be either count or mass, depending on the context. General Sherman used war as a mass noun when he said, "War is hell," while Benjamin Franklin used it as a count noun when he said, "All wars are follies, very expensive and very mischievous ones."



Many mass nouns have spawned countable spinoffs over time. Coffee is usually an undifferentiated mass ("Get me some coffee"), but in modern use it can also be treated as a count noun denoting a cupful of the beverage ("Get me a coffee") or a variety of the bean ("We serve the finest Arabica coffees"). The Stanford linguist Arnold Zwicky has dubbed this process "countification."



When the word e-mail first made its appearance in the early 1980s (often capitalized as E-mail), it was simply a shortening of electronic mail, and so it worked grammatically much like the mass noun mail. To itemize mail into its constituent parts you need to find a workaround like pieces of mail or letters. Similarly, individual pieces of e-mail came to be called e-mail notes or more commonly, e-mail messages. (Single terms like e-notes or e-letters never caught on.)



By the late '80s, e-mail message was slowly but surely shortened to e-mail. In the archives of the magazine InfoWorld, the earliest use of e-mail as a count noun that I can find is from July 20, 1987, in an advertisement for International Data Group (IDG). "Jane Lawrence, editor of IDG's PC Business World, receives an E-mail from [Ann] Wujcik requesting information," the ad reads. Though the magazine generally preferred e-mail message, by 1992 even InfoWorld's publisher Robert Metcalfe was using the short form: "I have to admit I am now getting so many E-mails I can only read all and answer a few of them."



The countable kind of e-mail(s) made further headway over the course of the '90s, despite complaints that it strayed from the founding model of mail, and by the turn of the millennium it had become widely accepted in mainstream usage. (The mass-noun version never went away, of course.) What happened? My theory is that the e- prefix no longer felt like such a transparent abbreviation of electronic, allowing e-mail to cast off the bonds that kept it close to mail of the snail variety. The word's new unitary feel was further strengthened by the trend of spelling it as email, without the hyphen. (The New York Times style guide continues to stick by hyphenated e-mail, and even advises using the older, longer form of the noun, e-mail message.)



The countification of e-mail mirrors some other recent developments in tech-talk. Unwanted e-mail, known as spam, is usually treated as a mass noun (just like the canned meat after which it is named), but individual spam messages now often get called spams. And the word blog, while always countable, has taken a new semantic turn: some use it to mean a single post to a Web site, rather than a whole site consisting of such posts. A recent survey by the Copyediting newsletter finds that most writers and editors reject this usage of blog as improper, but who knows? In a decade's time, it could be as unremarkable as countable e-mails.