Today one of my students asked me what “re:” stood for in the subject lines of e-mails (and letters). I thought I’d write the answer here, too, since many people take it to mean something else.
“Re:” is what is written in the subject line of e-mails (and in letters) to tell the receiver what the topic of the message is. For example: ‘Re: Your article’. Most people take this “re:” to stand for ‘reference’ or ‘regarding’. The reason for this could be that both these words start with the letters ‘re’, and what follows these letters is actually referring to the topic of the message. However, this is a misconception. What “re” actually stands for is the Latin word “res”. “Re” is the ablative form of the noun “res”, which means ‘thing’ or ‘affair’. Therefore, “re” means ‘about the thing’ or ‘about the affair’.
Filed under: Words Tagged: | business, linkedin, what is, Words, writing
Well, thank you for this! I always thought “re:” stood for “regarding,” too. Hm!
Very cool! I didn’t know that! Thanks for sharing!
Thank you, Jody and ‘Paper Rats’. Few people know this… it’s understandable considering “regarding” starts with “re”.
So then what does r.e. stand for? For example: (r.e. millage tax increases)?
Kathie, since you’re talking about property taxes, r.e. could stand for ‘real estate’.
(Can anyone confirm this, please?)
For emails, I do not believe this is correct. In old paper “Memorandums” Re: was understood to mean “Regarding.” However, in emails, this is replaced by “Subject:”. Re: appears when replying to a message, and means “Reply To:”
Hi, stumbled across this post after I Googled the question myself out of curiosity.
I, too, was under the impression that it was short for “regarding” and it seems unlikely to me that it would be a shortened form or “res”, since that word is already only three letters. Do you have a source for where you got the Latin explanation?