If you’re a writer or an editor or a grammar nerd, or if you just happen to do a lot of reading about technology and you’ve been around for a while, you may have noticed a trend for the word “Internet” to be written with a lower-case “i” instead of capital “I”. The process is called decapitalization, but “internet” is nothing new. In 2004, Wired News' copy chief Tony Long wrote:
Tony Long was wrong. There were—and still are—legitimate reasons for capitalizing the “I” in “internet. There are also compelling reasons for decapitalizing it. These competing forces are engaged in a back-and-forth tug of war, resulting in inconsistency in the spelling of the word. But one form is advancing over the other, and will ultimately win out.
Susan Herring is a professor of information science and linguistics at Indiana University. She has been studying language and the internet since probably before you were born.
The tug-of-war has been going on for years. Two years after Long issued his decree, Wired News was bought by Condé Nast, and the spelling of “internet” reverted back to capital “I”. Today the initial capital is also enshrined in the guidelines of many respected news sources, style guides, and dictionaries, including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Associated Press, the American Psychological Association, the Chicago Manual of Style, and Webster’s New World College Dictionary. The online scholarly journal for which I am editor-in-chief, Language@Internet, capitalizes “Internet”, following this standard practice.
According to Bob Wyman, a Google tech staffer and long-time Net expert, the “I” should be capitalized to make clear the difference in meaning between the Internet (the global network that evolved out of ARPANET, the early Pentagon network), and any generic internet, or computer network connecting a number of smaller networks. WIRED’s Style guide, published in 1996 and edited by Constance Hale, makes the same distinction. Indeed, the earliest citations for the word in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), from the mid-1970s, refer to “internet” in the generic sense and spell it with lowercase “i”, whereas all the later OED examples refer to the global network, using a capital “I”.
“If you never capitalize internet,” wrote Wyman in 2008 on his blog, “you are simply indicating that you don’t understand the technical distinction between the Internet and an internet.”
Yet in 1999, almost 10 years earlier, journalist Stephen Wilbers published a column in the Orange County Register predicting that words like Internet and Web would lose their capitalization over time. “If you like being ahead of the game, you might prefer to spell internet and web as internet and web,” he wrote. The reason usually given for this shift in usage is that the internet and the web are changing from proper nouns—unique, named entities—to generic nouns through common use. Indeed, most people (other than techies) are not aware of any internets other than the Internet—that distinction is no longer relevant in ordinary usage. And for many younger folks who have grown up with the technology, the internet itself is ordinary—just another communication medium, like the telephone, television, and radio.
There are plenty of examples in the history of the English language of decapitalization (and simplification) of common words that entered the language as unique, named entities. Words that were capitalized come to be written all in lower case. Multi-word expressions are joined by a hyphen and later condensed into a single un-hyphenated word. These processes are evident in generic terms derived from former brand names, such as frisbee (from Frisbee) and bandaid or band-aid (from Band-Aid, originally Band Aid), as well as in acronyms such as scuba (from SCUBA, or Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus).