On Writing The Word "Website"

A few short, messy thoughts on the way we write a single word.

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While reading an article on a decidedly different subject this morning, it struck me to read:

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a national campus free-speech organization, posted the video to their Web site.

I would encourage anyone to go read the original article — its topic, particularly the way it discusses timely, critical issues is vital to the safety of many marginalized voices on campuses today, particularly black voices. But, while I have a lot of opinions on trigger warning, safe spaces, and threats to the lives of minority students on campuses across the US, that’s not what I’m commenting on today. I want to focus on the part I bolded above: “Web site”. There are three ways to write the word website (okay, there are actually many, many ways to write “website” but I’ll be simplifying for the sake of time):

• Web site
• web site
• website

This isn’t so much a fully formed thought, as it is an excuse to capture an idea I had, so forgive the roughness. Nevertheless, let’s try some vaguely haughty linguistic analysis on a few of the different ways we can write this phrase:

“Web site”

This is the usage that I tend to see on most news sites. It strikes me as a more conservative vision of what the Internet is. Simply going off the grammar inherent in this writing, this turns the web into a proper noun, denoted by the capitalization of “Web.” Conceiving of the web as a proper noun seems, to imply that the Internet is a single, knowable “thing,” rather than an amorphous collection of loosely related, maybe even completely independent even, networks.

“web site”

This writing is similar to the first, but loses the capitalization, which means we’ve stopped conceptualizing the web as a single, proper noun. Still, breaking the words “web” and “site” invokes a sort of separation between the two entities. There’s a relation, sure, that’s implied by the use of the phrase “web site”, but keeping them separate words connotes that there is one “thing” over there (the “web”) and another, related but not exactly constituent, thing over here (the “page”).

“website”

In the course of writing this, I realized that this is how I usually write the word/ phrase. Maybe, at this point, I’m reading too much into things (as I usually do), but writing it a compound word lessens the distinction between the web and the page. In my head, and in the conceptualizations of the Internet I’ve heard from some of my friends, we conceive of a website as contributing to, not at all separate from, the “web” itself. Writing it this way (writing it this way, even, without actually paying attention to it before I wrote this thought out) seems to convey that idea.

This isn’t anything ground breaking, just a feverish idea written down in a few spare minutes, but I’d be happy to hear any thoughts you had reading this!