How major style guides rule on "homepage"
Most style guides have closed the compound, though Merriam-Webster still lists it open as the main form.
The disagreement on "homepage" is an example of whether a compound is open, hyphenated, or closed, the category of style-guide differences that most often confuses copy editors and creates inconsistency across long documents. Below is a guide-by-guide breakdown, drawn directly from the published editions cited.
| Style guide | Preferred form |
|---|---|
| AP Stylebook (2024–2025 Edition) | homepage |
| Chicago Manual of Style | homepage |
| MLA Handbook | homepage |
| APA Publication Manual | homepage |
| Merriam-Webster Dictionary | home page |
What the divergence actually means
The shift toward "homepage" largely consolidated around 2014, when major American style guides revised their entries to reflect actual published usage. Before that point, editorial style on this word was unsettled, and house styles split along whether they prioritized etymological transparency or contemporary convention. Source: AP Stylebook (2024–2025 Edition)
The APA Publication Manual aligns with AP and Chicago on "homepage", though APA generally addresses spelling questions only when they intersect with statistical reporting or technical psychology vocabulary. Where the manual is silent, APA defers to Merriam-Webster as its standard reference. Source: APA Publication Manual, 7th Edition
Merriam-Webster lists "home page", which serves as the lexicographic baseline for U.S. style decisions. Because Merriam-Webster's entries reflect aggregated published usage rather than editorial preference, when a guide says "follow Merriam-Webster", as APA does, that effectively delegates the call to whichever spelling has dominated the published corpus. Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary
Garner's Modern English Usage classifies the "homepage" / "home page" pair on its Language-Change Index, a five-stage scale measuring whether a once-disputed form has been accepted into Standard English. For whether a compound is open, hyphenated, or closed, Garner's typically rates the dominant form at Stage 4 ("ubiquitous but objected to by traditionalists") or Stage 5 ("fully accepted"). Source: Garner's Modern English Usage, 5th Edition
Practical guidance for editors
For working writers, the practical rule is straightforward: in journalism, follow AP; in academic writing in the humanities, follow MLA or Chicago; in social-science publishing, follow APA; in book publishing, follow Chicago. When no house style applies, Merriam-Webster's main entry is the safest default. The differences across these guides on "homepage" reflect not disagreement about correctness but different audiences and editorial pressures.
Editorial context
Google Books Ngrams data pinpoint the crossover where "homepage" surpassed "home page" in published books around 1998, propelled by the World Wide Web's mainstream emergence after Tim Berners-Lee's 1991 proposal and Netscape's 1994 release. This usage shift in print predated most style guide rulings, illustrating how neologisms from computing often solidify in corpora before editorial standardization; by 2005, the closed form held a 3:1 advantage, widening to over 20:1 today. Such evidence from vast scanned libraries reveals organic evolution invisible in prescriptive tables, as early adopters like Wired magazine normalized Click the homepage link to navigate. Meanwhile, "home page" endures sporadically in legacy software manuals, but general English favors the fused compound for its semantic unity akin to "webpage" or "email."
Cross-references
For the dictionary entry, frequency data, and pronunciation of homepage, see the main word page. For other style-guide spelling decisions in this category, browse all style-guide spelling rulings.