Capitalization of Internet

The Internet versus generic internets

The Internet standards community historically differentiated between an internet, as a short-form of an internetwork, and the Internet: treating the latter as a proper noun with a capital letter, and the former as a common noun with a lower-case first letter. An internet is any set of interconnected networks, whether they use Internet Protocol or otherwise.{{Citation | publication-place = | access-date = 2024-01-04

Another example from that period is IBM's TCP/IP Tutorial and Technical Overview from 1989 (updated in 1998), which stated that:

In the Request for Comments documents that define the evolving Internet Protocol standards, the term was introduced as a noun adjunct, apparently a shortening of "internetworking" and is mostly used in this way.

In its generic sense, internet is a common noun, a synonym for internetwork; therefore, it has a plural form (first appearing in the RFC series RFC 870, RFC 871 and RFC 872) and is not capitalized.

Within Internet studies

In their 2009 book Internet Inquiry, academics Annette Markham and Nancy Baym reported that the tendency within the field of Internet studies was to use an uncapitalized internet. Markham and Baym state that to capitalize internet arguably provides power and agency to the medium better provided to developers and users.

Evolution of the word

Conventions for the capitalization of Internet have varied over time. The term internet was originally coined as a shorthand for internetwork in the first specification of the Transmission Control Protocol in 1974. Because of the widespread deployment of the Internet protocol suite in the 1980s by educational and commercial networks beyond the ARPANET, the core network became increasingly known as the Internet, treated as a proper noun. The Oxford English Dictionary says that the global network is usually "the internet", but most of the American historical sources it cites use the capitalized form. Increasingly, the proper noun sense of the word takes a lowercase i, in orthographic parallel with similar examples of how the proper names for the Sun (the sun), the Moon (the moon), the Universe (the universe), and the World (the world) are variably capitalized in English orthography.

The spelling internet has become often used, as the word almost always refers to the global network; the generic sense of the word has become rare in non-technical writings. As a result, various style manuals, including The Chicago Manual of Style, the Associated Press's AP Stylebook, and the AMA Manual of Style, revised their formerly capitalized stylization of the word to lowercase internet in 2016. The New York Times, which followed suit in adopting the lowercase style, said that such a change is common practice when "newly coined or unfamiliar terms" become part of the lexicon. The same trend was previously applied to mentions of Web site (website).

In 2002, a New York Times column said that Internet has been changing from a proper noun to a generic term. Words for new technologies, such as phonograph in the 19th century, are sometimes capitalized at first, later becoming uncapitalized. In 1999, another column said that Internet might, like some other commonly used proper nouns, lose its capital letter.

Capitalization of the word as an adjective (specifically, a noun adjunct) also varies. Some guides specify that the word should be capitalized as a noun but not capitalized as an adjective, e.g., "internet resources."

Usage

Increasingly, organizations that formerly capitalized Internet have switched to the lowercase form, whether to minimize distraction (The New York Times) or to reflect growing trends as the term became generic (Associated Press Stylebook). In 2016, the Oxford English Dictionary found that, based on a study of around 2.5 billion printed and online sources, "Internet" was capitalized in 54% of cases. The study found that Internet remained more common in the US, while internet had become predominant in the UK.

Organizations and style guides that capitalize Internet include the Modern Language Association, Garner's Modern English Usage, the Internet Engineering Task Force, Ars Technica, the Internet Society,{{cite web|title=We capitalize Internet—every time. But why?

Notes

References

References

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2. RFC 871 (1982) "The 'network' composed of the concatenation of such subnets is sometimes called 'a catenet,' though more often—and less picturesquely—merely 'an internet.{{'"
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8. {{OED. internet
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