'log in to' or 'log into'?

[Claire Conant]

Feel free to disagree, but your rationale is just like saying, well, the 
masses do it, so it must be okay. Many people smoke, that doesn't make it 
healthy. Just because your preferred term gets an unusually high number of 
Google hits does not make it an authoritative source.

I don't believe the original poster made any differentiation between 
computer or internet. Either way, you are accessing a software application. 
You don't get in to the computer or application, you log on to the 
application.  Most editors of software documentation (of which I'm one) 
would change your content.  But then, I could be wrong and I'm sure someone 
will speak up and correct me.



--------------------------------------------------

> Andrew Warren wrote:
>
>
> With all due respect to the geniuses at Microsoft, I disagree.  These 
> days, there's generally no user-discernable difference between creating a 
> session on a computer, a network, or the internet/Internet.
>
> The "verb form is two words, noun form is one" rule is fine, as is the 
> clarification that the verb is "log on" rather than "log" (hence "log on 
> to" rather than "log onto")... But if I were deciding among "log in", "log 
> on", "sign in", and "sign on", I'd probably just do a Google search and go 
> with the most prevalent usage, since that's what's likely to be familiar 
> to my readers.
>
> Google says:
>
>  "sign on" password username:    295K hits
>  "log on" password username:     415K hits
>  "sign in" password username:  4,690K hits
>  "log in" password username:  21,000K hits
>
> Searching for the "ending a session" idiom, we find a similar pattern:
>
>  "sign off" password username: 154K hits
>  "log off" password username:  380K hits
>  "sign out" password username: 311K hits
>  "log out" password username:  940K hits
>
> So I'd use "log in" and "log out", and I'd use those phrases consistently, 
> without trying to manufacture a difference between logging in to a 
> computer and logging in to the internet.
>
> -Andrew
>