ユーザ or ユーザー, which is more in use or is there no difference?

Question

ユーザ or　ユーザー, which is more in use or is there no difference?

I see both of them in use, but is there one that is more correct than the other or is at least the prevailing standard?

a similar word is サーバ and　サーバー.

Answer 1

From the point of view of the pronounciation, ユーザー is closer to the original English word, and that is the generally accepted form in ordinary life, especially among people who are not particularly related to information technology. However, limited to the information technology context, ユーザ is the form that is officially stated as the correct form, and official documents are recommended to be written as such. If you are interested in the detail, you may want to take a look at Japanese Industrial Standard Z8301 Amendment G Article 6.2c and Table G3. You can see a copy here: (logical pages 58 and 59).

Answer 2

Well, a quick google search gives basically 500 million ユーザー and 100 million ユーザ. Wikipedia says both spellings exist. I conjecture the same conclusion for サーバー and many English words that finish in "er" in English and are used in Japanese.

I would go for the "アー" version.

Answer 3

Take whichever you want, but be consistent in your whole software/document/website.

My company often localizes Open Source applications to Japanese, and our rule is to not add ー if not necessary.

Also, Gentoo has its rule written like this:

GWN翻訳プロジェクトでは、ユーザやユーザー、コンピュータやコンピューターなど伸ばす、伸ばさない表記どちらもある場合については伸ばさない表記に統一することにしています

Translation: If both variations are in use, then do not add the final ー

Answer 4

I work in IT in Tokyo and we use Salesforce and Netsuite, both are localised not translated. They use ユーザ、ユーザログイン、ユーザ名、ユーザパスワード etc.

Microsoft uses ユーザー and also サーバー.

Yes, it does look like consistency and style because I have read and used both ユーザ　and ユーザー.

Answer 5

Wikipedia (ja) has a nice summary about omission of chōonpu ('─') character in general:

• In the industrial sector, it used to be customary to omit the last chōonpu of loanwords, and it still is followed by some specific fields and companies.
• Japanese Industrial Standard used to omit chōonpus by a certain rule, but it recently relaxed the rule to allow both omission or inclusion.
• Even today, there is no nation wide standard on this matter.

(abridged translation by me)

From my personal impression, a person who uses ユーザ consistently sounds like he's been knee-deep in the industry for more than a decade, while ユーザー users belong to the generation Y who grew up living in the web.

However, this is an overgeneralization which I'll avoid until I'm pressed to make a judgment. In my own writing, I've used both depending on my mood, if it weren't specified by a prescribed manual of style.