Is it “homeowner” or “home owner”? One word? Or two words? Similarly, is it “homeownership” or “home ownership”?

Naturally, we stumbled upon this question when we came up with this website.

Should we call it “Home Owner Headaches”? Or “Homeowner Headaches”?

It turns out that this is a surprisingly tricky question to answer because historically it has been used both ways.

According to the Collins dictionary, the two word usage is more prevalent in British English.

That said, the correct American English usage is one word (though British English also formally uses the compound word as in the States).

In fact, Answers.com says that most compound words started off as two separate words before merging together over time.

So perhaps that’s the source of the confusion.

In any case, as you can see in this website, Homeowner Headaches, we’ve opted to go with the single-word usage “homeowner” as well as the longer compound word “homeownership”.

You’d think that this should seal the deal in terms of the proper usage of the word, but apparently more people are used to the two-word way as opposed to the compound word.

Don’t believe me? Here’s some numbers to back it up.

By the way, these stats came from a keyword research tool that comes with the hosting platform of this website.

Hopefully, we’ve cleared this up for you.