Bye-bye Web site, hello website.

Or is it?

The upcoming AP Stylebook, a reference followed by much of the media, will show Web site combined as one word with a lower-case letter w, reports GrumpyEditor.com.

Confusion looms in editorial rooms because other locations in the course of writing stories are pinpointed in two words, such as vacation site, weather site, bomb site, building site and murder site.

Try running those words together and one gets the confusing vacationsite, weathersite, etc.

The two-into-one contractions are even confusing to spell checkers.

Other sources also reject the use of website.

Take Webster’s Online Dictionary, for example.

It’s description in the computing category: “Web site (not website). Any computer on the Internet running a World-Wide Web server process.”

As for the 2010 Stylebook, expected to be available next month, "We decided to make the change because 'website' is increasingly common," says Sally Jacobsen, deputy managing editor for projects at the AP and one of three Stylebook editors.

"We also had invited readers and users of the Stylebook to offer us some suggestions for a new social media guide that we're including in the 2010 Stylebook, and we got a very good response and a large number of people who favored 'website' as one word."

AP’s entry reads:

website: A location on the World Wide Web that maintains one or more pages at a specific address. Also, webcam, webcast and webmaster. But as a short form and in terms with separate words, the Web, Web page and Web feed.