Job Discussion Forums

[fof]

Not exactly ME related, but this is the Forum I read so...
I have been drilling my students that Internet must be capitalized. I have checked a few dictionaries, online and regular, and Internet is capitalized.
I have British English teaching resources, and have seen other British sources where it is not capitalized.
Is this a British/N. American difference? Are there rules for when it should be capitalized or not? Thanks

[veiledsentiments]

If you just google the word "internet," it seems that the vast majority come up with a capital "i." Does majority rule?

What feels right to me is the if we are talking about the Internet, it would have a capital, but if we are using it as a adjective I wouldn't. (internet websites vs websites on the Internet)

VS

[adorabilly]

Hi Fof.

Just my .2 fil.

I believe that over time it has gone from needing the capital letter to not needing the capital. This would be because the use of the internet and the popular view has changed over time. When the internet was developed it was new and as such a proper noun. Over time with general usage it is becoming more popular and prevalent (and thus more common).

You can see similar developments if you look at older dictionaries when Television, Radio, RADAR were developed. In dictionaries that are under 5 years from when those items were developed they were in the dictionaries in capital letters. (and with RADAR and SCUBA, with full acrynoyms and the periods between the letters. If you look today television, radio, radar, and scuba are all lowercase common nouns.

I would state in the case of internet that unless you are speaking of the proper Internet, then it would be lowercase.

IMHO.

This is actually a full fledged argument and there is a page on wikipedia discussing it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_capitalization_conventions

I think over time it will devolve from Internet (the proper noun) to internet, similar to when the telephone, the television, radar, and radio were all considered proper nouns and have devolved into common nouns.

[mandalayroad]

What adorability said.
You just saved me from having to type the same kind of response.

[007]

Here is my 2 riyals.

Well, I think we have to refer to the technical community that invented and named the Internet, to know when to use 'I" or 'i' for its name!

"the convention is to capitalize when one is writing about the specific �internet� that we call the Internet and not to capitalize when referring to generic internets."
http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/03/27/internet-vs-internet-and-web-vs-web-wisdom-from-bob-wyman-based-on-ietf-usage/


The Internet is an internet.
The Web is a web.

[mishmumkin]

I second adorabilly on this one, too. The word "e-mail" has dropped the hypen in its short existence.

[johnslat]

Perhaps we can coin an aphorism:
The general usage of languages will always (? - maybe often would be better) develop in ways that make writing/speaking more simple.