Definition of email

The word "email" originated in the mid-1970s. It is a combination of two words: "electronic" and "mail". The term was coined by Ray Tomlinson, an American computer programmer and engineer, who is credited with inventing the first email system. Tomlinson was working on a project for the United States Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) when he developed the first email system. He needed a way to send messages between different computer systems, and he came up with the idea of using the @ symbol to separate the user's name from the host computer's name. Tomlinson sent the first email in 1971, and the term "email" quickly gained popularity. The word was first used in 1978 in a technical paper written by Tomlinson. Since then, email has become a ubiquitous form of communication around the world.