Is it Eon or EON?

Image from the 2012 documentary Everything Or Nothing

On Facebook, the blog caught a debate whether it should be Eon Productions or EON Productions.

EON would indicate an acronym. In 1983, an updated version of Steven Jay Rubin’s The James Bond Films was published. “I’ve also discovered that Eon Productions stands for Everything or Nothing Productions, an appropriate tag,” Rubin wrote in the introduction for the update.

In the late 1990s, the officially sanctioned documentary Inside Dr. No seemed to try to debunk that idea.

NARRATOR (Patrick Macnee): For many years, some speculate the (Eon) name stands for everything or nothing.

MICHAEL G. WILSON: Cubby (Broccoli) was always…when I said to him does it mean “Everything Or Nothing,” he said, “I’ve never heard of that.”

OK. Also, eon is a word defined as “an indefinite and very long period of time, often a period exaggerated for humorous or rhetorical effect.”

Except….flash forward to the 2012 documentary Everything Or Nothing.

BARBARA BROCCOLI: Cubby and Harry (Saltzman) formed a company called Eon, everything or nothing.

Accompanying Barbara Broccoli’s quote is image of Eon business cards, where it’s spelled Eon, rather than EON.

So, over a period of years, you had the two leaders of Eon (or EON) Productions telling different versions of the company’s origin. Meanwhile, there was an officially licensed video game titled James Bond 007: Everything or Nothing.

Regardless, there are differences in English-English and American-English about how you treat acronyms. The term “public limited company” is usually abbreviated PLC in the U.S., while in the U.K., it is abbreviated as “Plc.”

Beyond that, companies love to bend the rules of English (on either side of the Atlantic Ocean). Time magazine refers to itself as TIME, even if nobody else does so. Boeing is formally The Boeing Company but The Associated Press and other news organizations simply refer to it as Boeing Co.

Going back to Eon, the company that produces James Bond films, its key figures don’t agree whether the name is an acronym or not.

On Eon’s website, the name is spelled EON. However, the company’s films, such as DR. NO, CASINO ROYALE, QUANTUM OF SOLACE, SKYFALL and SPECTRE are spelled with all capital letters. So that’s not very definitive, either.

Ultimate answer: It’s up to you. The available information is, at best, conflicting.