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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.
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word-choice loanwords katakana
ユーザ or ユーザー, which is more in use or is there no difference?
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.
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2011-07-11T08:53:59.010
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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](http://www.gentoo.gr.jp/jpmain/project-gwn.xml)
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
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I work in IT in Tokyo and we use [Salesforce](http://www.salesforce.com/jp/)
and [Netsuite](http://www.netsuite..co.jp/portal/jp/index.html), 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](http://www.microsoft.com/japan/athome/club/default.aspx) uses ユーザー
and also [サーバー](http://www.microsoft.com/ja-jp/default.aspx).

Yes, it does look like consistency and style because I have read and used both
ユーザ and ユーザー.
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2011-07-11T14:48:20.460
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From the point of view of the pronunciation, `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)](http://www.neca.or.jp/pdf/NECA0202_2006.pdf).
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[Wikipedia
(ja)](http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%95%B7%E9%9F%B3%E7%AC%A6#.E9.95.B7.E9.9F.B3.E7.AC.A6.E3.81.AE.E7.9C.81.E7.95.A5)
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.
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Since nobody has given any hard data on the question of which of ユーザー and ユーザ
is "more in use", here is the result of the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary
Written Japanese (accessed via <http://nlb.ninjal.ac.jp/search/>)

```

    ユーザー 2566 results (84%)
    ユーザ　  487 results (16%)
    
```

For サーバー and サーバ the bias is less prevalent

```

    サーバー 1011 results (55%)
    サーバ　  813 results (45%)
    
```
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