Sep 04 2008
Web site, web site, website
Too much time at b9Web has been spent over trying to decide whether to use “web site” or “website” or “Web site” as the proper usage for a word or words that describe an electronic publication on the World Wide Web. We quit using the abomination “e-mail” years ago because the hyphen was a pain in the you-know-where to use each time the word had to be keyed.
And the English language has a habit of turning two nouns working together all the time, the first of which modifies the second, into one word, as in “steamboat,” which used to be “steam” and “boat,” with the first noun modifying the second as a means of moving the boat. Seems silly now and makes us wonder if “row” and “boat” were separated at one point in time until they became the single word “rowboat.” The answer requires a visit to the Oxford English Dictionary and more time than we have to spare at the moment. A quick trip to wordbiz.com was sufficient and corroborated by a letter just received from the Social Security Administration that used the word “website” with no spaces and no capitalization. That’s good enough for us.
So we’ve decided on “website” because common usage is headed in that direction if it hasn’t gotten there already. Not that formal style manuals such as the Modern Language Association stylebook and the Associated Press style book don’t still recommend “Web site” with the word “Web” capitalized, so if you’re still in school, check your local style manual for the proper usage becuase spelling is not the issue.
b9Web will continue to capitalized the word “Web” as a proper noun contraction of the term “World Wide Web” just as we’ll continue to capitalized “Internet” as a proper noun and continue to use lower case for the “b” in “b9″ and uppercase for the word “Web” in “b9Web” as a contraction for b9 Web Consulting LLC. Most people tend to shorten polysyllabic words into two or three syllables anyway, as in FedEx.
Please note that we started using “website” in the last post on site management, meaning website management.