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Is it acceptable to lowercase 'google' in all verb forms?

For example:

  • He googled the information.
  • He is googling the information.
  • He googles the information.
  • Please google the information.

Is it now acceptable to lowercase the word 'internet'?

Mari-Lou A
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whippoorwill
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    I doubt that Google thinks this is legitimate. By lower-casing it you are treating the word as if it were not a trademark, and continued use in that way can cause the loss of the Google trademark. I rather imagine they have lawyers who write pointed letters to people who use lower-case "google" in published works. – Hot Licks Mar 29 '15 at 21:28
  • ("Internet" isn't a trademark -- you can spell it however you want.) – Hot Licks Mar 29 '15 at 21:29
  • @HotLicks I strongly doubt Google lawyers will care if I write: "I have to google that." I've seen google, googling, googled written in lowercase so often now, it's not worth bothering about. Although I admit, I do prefer to write Internet with a capital letter. – Mari-Lou A Mar 29 '15 at 21:47
  • Yes, it is acceptable. For any new word, please participate actively to contribute your usage to it. Don't let the corporations or self-appointed "authorities" intimidate you. Play your part in defining new and emerging words in the English language. Be a responsible citizen of the English language. – Blessed Geek Mar 29 '15 at 22:07
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    This isn't a [punctuation] question, and it shows no research at all – Andrew Leach Mar 29 '15 at 22:07
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    One dictionary entry doesn't make an authority, to which we need to conform. that would prevent us from contributing to redefining it through our own preference of such a new word. – Blessed Geek Mar 29 '15 at 22:13
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    @BlessedGeek That doesn’t change the fact that the question, like nearly all of whippoorwill’s questions, doesn’t show any trace of even the most cursory research. One dictionary entry does not an authority make, but it is certainly a bare minimum of research that ought to be included in the question. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 29 '15 at 22:43
  • I don't usually research on the history of the asker's question history, and I will take each question as an independent perspective. After one hundred lottery tickets, I will give the benefit of doubt, that the 101st attempt would be a winning ticket. In fact, I don't even bother to look at the name of the asker, usually. Unless it is +Mari-lou, whose questions/answers seem to catch my attn. – Blessed Geek Mar 29 '15 at 23:05
  • @Mari-LouA - Once upon a time the Bayer company of Germany owned the trademark "Aspirin" in the US. (It still does overseas.) But Bayer failed to crack down on the use of "aspirin" by others to designate a generic brand of ASA, so Bayer lost the right to claim the copyright. I seriously doubt that Google wants to allow Bing to use the term "google" to describe their product. – Hot Licks Mar 30 '15 at 01:16
  • In effect, when you use "google" rather than "Google" you are walking across someone else's yard to get to the shopping center. (This as a reasonable analogy, since if the property owner allows such trespass long enough, without taking steps to prevent it, he can forfeit the land upon which the path is trod.) – Hot Licks Mar 30 '15 at 01:22
  • @HotLicks " I seriously doubt that Google wants to allow Bing to use the term "google" to describe their product" that is a very different kettle of fish. However, when a product becomes so well known, and it is in synergy with its task (to search), there's little a company can do. Ask the people at AltaVista if they would have objected if people had said I need to altavisit that; she altavisited that's guy's name the other day etc. – Mari-Lou A Mar 30 '15 at 03:41
  • It's a fact that Google has permeated our lives, and a testament to Google's success that people immediately understand what "Let me google that for you" means. It also helps keep the brand very much alive. I don't believe the term aspirin was ever, in its history, used in such a versatile way. – Mari-Lou A Mar 30 '15 at 03:42

2 Answers2

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Google - verb is usually capitalised, but the lower case is also used, (see Ngram).

  • The transitive verb to google (also spelled Google) means using the Google search engine to obtain information on something or somebody on the World Wide Web. However, in many dictionaries the verb refers to using any web search engine, such as Yahoo!.

Ngram: googling vs Googling

Internet vs internet:

  • Many American style guides recommend capitalizing the first letter of Internet, and most major American publications (as well as many Canadian ones) do so. Outside North America, internet is rarely capitalized.

  • The non-U.S. approach makes more sense. There is no good reason to capitalize internet. The convention in English is to capitalize the first letters of proper nouns, which are the official names of people, places, objects, or events.

  • The internet is none of these. It was originally capitalized to differentiate the Internet (the global network that anyone can access) from an internet (any network of interconnected computers), but in common usage this distinction is now irrelevant. Internet is now just a generic term for the communication medium.

(The Grammarist)

Community
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  • I disagree with the Grammarist here. The comments on the linked page provide plenty of counter-arguments, but to summarize: It CAN be considered a place, albeit a virtual/distributed one. And either way, it is still a specific, global computer network; it is governed by regulatory bodies (IETF, ICANN, et al.); it is the only such network in existence; and thus distinct from a generic computer network. The only point the counter-arguers get wrong is the notion of generic "internets"; there is only one; the rest are intranets and extranets. – Hugh Guiney Mar 20 '16 at 04:21
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Yes, having google or googling in lowercase is acceptable. See Merriam-Webster.

Also, for internet, see this Wikipedia article. It has become a generic term and can safely be lowercased.

Mike
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