Dr. David Bourland coined the term E-Prime, short for English Prime, to refer to the English language modified by prohibiting the use of the verb "to be." E-Prime arose from Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics and his observation that English speakers most often use "to be" to express dogmatic beliefs or assumptions or to avoid expressing opinions and feelings as such.

The verb can express several distinct meanings:

• identity, of the form "noun be noun" [The cat is a longhair]
• predication, of the form "noun be adjective" [The cat is furry]
• auxiliary, of the form "noun be verb" [The cat is sleeping]
• existence, of the form "noun be" [There is a cat]
• location, of the form "noun be place" [The cat is on the mat]

Its advocates assert that the use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of writing that reduces the possibility for misunderstanding and conflict. One might speculate on the usefulness of E-Prime in constructing encyclopaediae concerned with maintaining a neutral point of view. Detractors might observe that Arabic already lacks a verb form of "to be" or "is", and this has not noticably reduced conspiratorial thinking, or even affected the way they speak. If one wanted to assert, in Arabic, that an apple is red, the literal translation probably wouldn't be "The apple looks red," but "The apple red." That is, the verb form of "to be" can be communicated even if the word itself doesn't exist.

One cannot use E-Prime with C. K. Ogden's Basic English because Basic has a closed set of verbs that does not include the verbs such as "become", "remain", and "equal" that E-Prime uses to express states of "being".

See also

• Grammatical voice
• Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis