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The Associated Press shook up the world last week. The World Wide Web, that is.
The AP, whose stylebook is ubiquitous in newsrooms real and virtual around the other www (whole wide world), has decreed that the place one visits on the World Wide Web shall henceforth be known as a âwebsite.â
As opposed to what, many of you may be asking? A carburetor?
No, as opposed to a âWeb site,â âWebsite,â âweb-site,â or âWeb-site.â
APâs previous style was to call it a âWeb site,â though all of the above uses occasionally crept in. âWeb siteâ made more sense a very long time agoâabout twenty yearsâwhen the World Wide Web was new and people were just starting to develop ways for computer users to interact with it. A word for those, um, sites had to be invented.
Under its entryâfor âweb siteââthe Oxford English Dictionary lists the first citation from 1993, in a publication called Computer Shopper: âAlas, the WEB has just begun its development. When we checked, we found that thereâs not even a single WEB site in North America, although there is a very good chance that one will exist by the time this goes to print.â Merriam-Webster traces the first use of âWeb siteâ to 1992.
But the Web is no longer new, and, even if the World Wide Web remains a proper noun, âwebâ has become a common prefixââwebcam,â âwebcast,â âwebinar,â etc.âand it looks silly to single out âWeb siteâ for special treatment.
The decision to go with âwebsiteâ was hailed by many, including a large group of copy editors meeting in Philadelphia, though there was some disagreement in the extended discussions about it on Twitter. After all, it involves fewer keystrokesâno hitting the caps key, and no space bar.
Most dictionaries still list âWeb siteâ as the preferred spelling, even as many include âwebcam,â and it will be interesting to see how quickly they embrace the AP, or popular usage. Some style guides, including The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage and The Chicago Manual of Style, still prefer the use of âWeb siteââfor now, at least
Why does this matter? In many ways, it doesnât, since no reader is going to think that a âWeb siteâ is different from a âwebsite.â But style guides exist to encourage consistency within a publication when thereâs more than one ârightâ way to do something. Thereâs only one (correct) spelling of âaccommodate,â for example, but should it be âcanceledâ or âcancelledâ? Both are correct; the decision on which to use is a style decision.
The main reason to encourage consistency is so a reader wonât stop and say, âHey, wait, wasnât this word spelled differently earlier?â You donât want your readers to stop. You want them to continue reading. Then they will spend more time on what last week was your âWeb site,â and is now your âwebsite.â Though, since CJR follows the Chicago manual, youâll continue to read this column (we hope) on its âWeb site.â
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