nouns - "Home page" or "homepage"?



Is there a convention for the spelling of the name of the main page of a website? Should it be home page, with a space between the two words; or homepage, all one word?



Answer



"Home page" was used first, but "homepage" followed soon after, is also acceptable and I prefer.




  • Homepage was used to refer to the main page of a website as early as July 1993.




  • Home page was used to refer to the main page of a website as early as September 1992.



    • The first web browser was only written (by Tim Berners-Lee) in 1990-1991.




  • Home page was used to refer to the main page of a HyperCard system as early as March 1991.



    • HyperCard was a successful hypermedia forerunner to the WWW.




Style guides


These style guides use homepage:



These style guides use home page:



(More style guides here.)


homepage


The OED has home page from August 1993, and homepage from 1997, however I found homepage in Usenet as early as July 1993.


The first uses both homepage and home page in the same paragraph.


12th July 1993 - sci.astro.hubble - "NASA's Project STELAR announces WWW server for public access" - Archie Warnock:



I am also collecting WWW homepage documents with the intention of making them available through WAIS, as an experiment in combining the search functionality of WAIS with the display and hypertext capabilities of WWW and Mosaic. If you run a WWW server and would like your home page included in this database, just mail the HTML file to me.



The next, from the next day, uses Homepage.html as a filename and also as a standalone noun.


13th July 1993 - comp.infosystems.www - "A possible feature for WWW Options" - Jonathan B. Marder:



What I would like to see is a "tree" of documents visited which shows not only the URLs but also how the document was called. e.g.:-


Homepage.html |---> URL-1 -----> URL-1a 
              | 
              \---> URL-2 -----> URL-2a 
                        | 
                         \----> URL-2b

...and so on. This would be added to throughout the session. Actually, it would be nice if the user could edit in some annotation and save it for use as a future homepage.



home page


Home page can also be antedated in Usenet. The earliest computing use I found is in reference to HyperCard. According to Wikipedia:



HyperCard was an application program and programming tool for Apple Macintosh and Apple IIGS computers, that was among the first successful hypermedia systems before the World Wide Web.



18th March 1991 - rec.radio.amateur.misc - "Hypercard HamStack Articles Part 2 of 8" - Diana L. Syriac:



If you are using recent ham stacks (Novice and Tech v3.0 or greater or General, Advanced, Extra v2.0 or greater), AND you have not yet entered the Ham Stacks (ie, you're still on the Home page), there's an easier way to get started that is faster (this option stops the automatic random generation of a test).



The first WWW use I found is from the following year.


11th September 1992 - talk.politics.misc and talk.bizarre - "Voice: Issue #1 Out!" - Tom Boutell:



The first issue, which deals with abortion and specifically with the Roe vs. Wade U.S. Supreme Court decision's legacy, is now available by the following means:


[...]



  • On the World Wide Web hypertext system (soon). This is a wonderful way to read the magazine, but I haven't heard from the web's maintainer in approximately a month. (If you already use it and are comfortable with making your own links from home pages of your own, write to me and I'll give you the necessary information to link to the magazine.)



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

verbs - "Baby is creeping" vs. "baby is crawling" in AmE

Years and years ago, I remember reading in a book on AmE usage that the phrasal turn a baby creeps before it walks was to some extent more common to AmE than to BrE, which preferred exclusively the "crawl" version. And so, I just recently checked on the accuracy of that information on NGram Viewer , and it actually was fact... more than a century ago! What I would like you to tell is if it would sound sort of weird to hear someone say today in the US that a child "creeps" before walking and running (see Synonyms ) rather than it crawls. Also, what's the story to those terms? How did "to crawl" come to prevail and supersede "to creep" to describe the way a baby moves around? As with a plant, so with a child. His mind grows by natural stages. A child creeps before he walks , sits before he stands, cries before he laughs, babbles before he talks, draws a circle before he draws a square, lies before he tells the truth, and is selfish before he
Read more

commas - Does this sentence have too many subjunctives?

Does this sentence have too many subjunctives? If it please the king, let it be decreed that they be destroyed, and I will pay 10,000 talents of silver into the hands of those who have charge of the king's business, that they may put it into the king's treasuries. I am stumped by this sentence construction. First, there is "Let it be," which is a common English idiomatic phrase, but then it follows another subjunctive. Is that to say you can actually have a subjunctive followed by another subjunctive? Also, why does the sentence use "please"? If that's the subjunctive tense there, then why is it followed by another subjunctive instead of a conditional, or maybe "Let it be" is the conditional? Lastly, I wish to know how the that is used in the sentence. Perhaps, the simplified sentence can be restated like so: Let it be decreed that they be destroyed and that they may put it into the king's treasuries. If not, maybe the simplified sent
Read more

time - English notation for hour, minutes and seconds

I often see English notation about time using the " and ' symbols. I have always mistaken about the two, and even their meaning. I'm more used to "01:05:56", for example. How do you represent the hour, minutes, and seconds using the apostrophe and quotes punctuations? Which is for the hour, which is for minutes, and which is for seconds? Is it the common way to write duration of time elapsed? Do they have a special pronunciation? Answer It's not particularly common for expressions of time. It's similar to degrees-minutes-seconds: instead of decimal degrees (38.897212°,-77.036519°) you write (38° 53′ 49.9632″, -77° 2′ 11.4678″). Both are derived from a sexagesimal counting system such as that devised in Ancient Babylon: the single prime represents the first sexagesimal division and the second the next, and so on. 17th-century astronomers used a third division of 1/60th of a second. The advantage of using minute and second symbols for time is that it o
Read more

grammatical number - Use of lone apostrophe for plural?

I've been reading William Manchester's book "American Caesar", which is about Douglas MacArthur, and I found that he uses a strange convention for pluralizing the family name. When talking about the MacArthurs as a whole, he writes MacArthur' with an apostrophe, as in "After the war, the MacArthur' lived in Tokyo while the general was proconsul" (yes, he uses that term to describe him). I have never seen or heard of a rule that would prescribe this. Manchester is a bit old-timey in his style: for example, he also writes "in behalf of" instead of "on behalf of", which is the only one I have ever seen. So perhaps this is similar. Where does he get this apostrophe from? Edit: There seems to be some difficulty finding examples, which is odd. Here is a direct link to a page from Google Books that shows the apostrophe.
Read more

etymology - Origin of "s--t eating grin"

What is the origin of the phrase shit eating grin ? How did it come to mean showing smugness or self-satisfaction of an individual's actions? Answer From the Urban Dictionary: ...these uses are documented in the Oxford English Dictionary no earlier than 1957 There have been similar expressions used quite far back: In Book XXI of his History of Rome, Livy describes a Carthaginian sect of coprophages, the risus faecivorus, or shit-eating grin, being commonly displayed by its adherents. Although, its origin is undetermined, they may have been incidents which caused the invention of this phrase. Below is an excerpt: "1944 Jrnl. Nerv. & Mental Dis. XCIX. 959 Among demented patients in advanced stages of their illness,..it is not rare to see some of them grasp their own feces, chew them and eat them often with great pleasure and satisfaction (coprophagia).
Read more

etymology - Where does the phrase "doctored" originate?

This is a phrase I’m particularly confused about, because it’s used often when something is manipulated or changed. For example, sometimes images surface online that are clearly Photoshopped, but people refer to them as “doctored” images. Why use the word “doctored” here? Answer The earliest Google Books match for an instance of doctored in a transitional (or perhaps post-transitional) sense between "amended" and "adulterated" appears in William Marshall, The Rural Economy of Glocestershire; Including Its Dairy: Together with the Dairy Management of North Wiltshire, and the Management of Orchards and Fruit Liquor, in Herefordshire , volume 2 (1789): Men in general, however, whose palates are set to rough cider, consider the common sweet sort as an effeminate beverage; and rough cider, properly manufactured, is probably the most generous liquor; being deemed more wholesome, to habits in general, than sweet cider:—even when genuine. That which is drank, in the kingd
Read more

word choice - Which is the correct spelling: “fairy” or “faerie”?

Fairy vs. faerie — which is the correct spelling? Answer As others have noted, fairy is the standard modern spelling, and faerie is a pseudo-archaism. However, in some contexts there is now a semantic distinction between the two spellings! In particular, fairy tales and the associated idea of fairies typically refer to the genre of folk stories printed by the Brothers Grimm, then sweetened and popularized for modern audiences by Disney et al. Faerie stories , on the other hand, are stories about the fae : otherworldly, unpredictable, and dangerous creatures who appear in the folk-tales and myths of England and Ireland. In origin, of course, the fairies and the fae are one and the same, but the connotations and usage of the words today are headed in opposite directions. A Google image search for fairy vs. faerie shows a lot of overlap, but some very significant differences in tone and content between the two terms. Note that the search for "fairy" turns up a number
Read more