The competitive gaming field has grown tremendously over the past two decades. Because of this, the term behind the industry has officially become a part of the English language that is used on a near-daily basis, not only by gamers, but also by publications like us. There is just one problem; not everyone can agree on how to write it correctly, including some of our colleagues within the publishing industry.
The main problem is capitalization: some capitalize the “S” to make it “eSports,” similar to the stylization of “iPhone” or “iPad,” while others feel that it should always be written with a capital “E” at the beginning or include a dash in-between. As a media outlet you’re then stuck between esports, eSports or e-sports, which is a perfect recipe for non-consistent writing practices, especially if you’re managing a handful of writers like we do. Because of that we decided to dig in to the topic and find out that the correct capitalization is no capitalization at all – it’s written “esports”.
Well, Who Says That That’s the Correct Spelling for Esports?
After years of journalists, gamers, and just about everyone else trying to spell esports in a myriad of different ways, the Associated Press (AP) finally weighed in on the matter in 2017 with an announcement made at the American Copy Editors Society convention. They made it clear that it was not an easy decision, as they had previously accepted it as both “eSports” and “e-sports” and there was still evidence to support both spellings.
In the end, the choice was made based on “industry trends and general usage.” Most people search on Google for “esports” with no capitalization or hyphen, leading them to determine that the best way to use and standardize this word for mainstream users was to make “esports” the one and only accepted spelling. The “E” should only be capitalized if the word is in a title or at the beginning of a sentence. Their decision should carry over into all media, even if it may take a while for the change to happen.
To make the point even clearer, we made our own research by using Ahref’s Keyword Explorer and compared the total search volume in United States for the term “esports” and “e-sports”, it was already obvious from the dashboard that the word without the hyphen is the clear winner. The term “esports” has a total search volume of 43,000 within the US, with over 237,000 worldwide, while the one with the hyphen barely reaches 32,000 on a global level.
Funnily enough, Google Trends doesn’t even have any other version except “esports” under their topic section, so even if we wanted to research it, we couldn’t.
Between Esports, eSports and E-Sports, This Spelling Makes the Most Logical Sense
One of the biggest and most convincing arguments for “esports” being the standard spelling of the term is that it is very similar to the word “email.”
Email is short for “electronic mail,” and esports is short for “electronic sports.” At the beginning, email was written as “e-mail,” but over time trends changed and “email” became the standard because it was spelled that way more often by people who used the word on a daily basis.
According to the AP style guide, some words like e-book and e-commerce will keep their hyphens (for now), but esports will join email in being shortened and made simpler to write, perhaps because of the frequency of its use.
I’d love to tell you that this is something that we personally decided on a live stream in-between game rounds, but there’s a higher power in charge of the issue, and most of our journalists and editors agree with it.” – John Arren, Editor in Chief of EsportsHeadlines.com
Why Does It Even Matter How You Write Esports?
Most readers would surely know what you are referring to whether you spelled it Esports, eSports, e-sports, esports, or EsPoRtS. But human readers are not necessarily the problem.
Aside from it being a stylistic issue (it doesn’t look great to have one major newspaper spell it one way while its competitor spells it another), it is a good idea to have a standardized spelling of a word so that everyone who is looking for said word in a database (or just on the internet) can find what they need. Some search engines are not complex enough to understand that e-sports and esports are the same word and mean the same thing, so they would return you two entirely different pages of results based on how you spelled it.
It may not seem like it, but capitalization and hyphens can completely change your search results. One example would be our own search engine here at EsportsHeadlines.com. Like many other publications, we’re running on WordPress, and the same platform has a search engine that treats e-sports and esports as two separate words. Feel free to try it yourself, go to the upper right corner and first type in “e-sports”, check the results, then redo the same search by using “esports”. This is not only the case with us, go and try the same thing on a Kotaku.com or PureXbox.com, you’ll see what I mean.
So, to keep down confusion and to allow all the content on esports to be found in the same place, it is best to have one, single, standard spelling of the word. Thankfully, the long-raging debate over how to spell esports has finally come to an end, and we can all spell it the same way: esports.
What to Do if You See a Business Misspelling the Word Esports?
You need to organize a witch hunt, of course! Jokes aside, there are businesses that named their projects long before this issue came to light, with United Kingdom eSports Association as one example. At the time of formation they thought that “eSports” is the way to go, but as soon as the industry moved forward they incorporated the new style. The same will happen to every other business or project that carries the outdated “eSports” spelling, so the only thing you could do as a gaming enthusiast is to be patient and support them in their transition if you can.
