Suzanne Moore, the Telegraph columnist, found it ‘deeply annoying’ when perhaps five years ago she noticed people putting ‘Kind regards’ at the ends of emails. Her real gripe was with false claims to kindness.
So what should you put at the end of an email? Yours sincerely is conventional in letters to people whom one knows. Sincerely in this context is first recorded by the beloved Oxford English Dictionary from the year 1702, in a letter to Samuel Pepys, in the last year of his life, from Arthur Charlett, the gossipy self-promoting Master of University College, Oxford, who had designed a bookplate for the diarist. He signed himself as ‘your most sincerely obedient Servant’.
To people we don’t know, we were taught as children to end a letter Yours faithfully. This is found earlier than sincerely by the OED in a letter of 1564 from Zurich to Myles Coverdale by a Protestant of deep dye, Thomas Lever, who subscribed himself ‘yours faithfully in Christ’.
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