AP Style - technology marches on - email, cellphone, smartphone

Last year at the American Copy Editors Society meeting, AP announced it was following the crowd, giving up its stubborn insistence on Web site and henceforth going with website.

Today, with ACES in session in Phoenix, AP announces it is going with the flow again and making cellphone and smartphone one word and dropping the hyphen from email.

AP also is adopting handheld, one word, for the noun (though I hope the use of that jargonish term will be rare) while hand-held, the preferred dictionary spelling, stays for the adjective.

Who knows? If this keeps up we might yet get "workforce" and "underway," as most of the rest of the universe now does it.

In another change not yet from AP, but I see posted on the ACES convention site, AP is adopting Kolkata, instead of Calcutta, for the Indian city.

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Update: The backlash, such as it is, already has begun on Twitter at #teamhyphen

A bit more from the meeting: Nick Jungman reports AP is abandoning its short-lived idea (from last year) to spell out state names in datelines.