this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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Slightly different, but I've had people insist on slop.
A higher up at work asked the difference between i.e. e.g. and ex. I answered, they weren't satisfied and made their assistant ask the large language model. Their assistant reads the reply out loud and it's near verbatim to what I just told them. Ugh
This is not the only time this has happened
So whats the difference exactly?
I.e. is used to restate for clarification. It doesn't really relate to the other two, and should not be used when multiple examples are listed or could be listed.
E.g. and ex. are both used to start a list of examples. They're largely equivalent, but should not be mixed. If your organization has a style guide consult that to check which to use. If it doesn't, check the document and/or similar documents to see if one is already in use, and continue to use that. If no prior use of either is found, e.g. is more common.
Thanks
So i.e. would be like "the most useful object in the galaxy i.e. a towel"
And eg would be like "companies e.g. meta, viatris, ehrmann, edeka" Right?
Exactly. If you've got a head for remembering Latin, i.e. is id est, so you can try swapping "that is" into the sentence to see if it sounds right.
E.g. is exempli gratia so you can try swapping "for example" in for the same trick.
If you forget, avoiding the abbreviations is fine in most contexts. That said, I'd be surprised if mixing them up makes any given sentence less clear.
ie basically means "in other words"
eg and ex mean "for example"
fwiw: I always remember it as "example given" and "in essence"
I just use "for EGsample" and "for EXample"
Also "In Eoutherwords"
But for those wondering: ie and eg are actually Latin acronyms!
i.e. - id est - "that is"
e.g. - exempli grata - "for example"
that's how I remember it too!