One Page or the Whole Site?

In English, a home page is the single front door of a website — the landing page you reach first, with links branching out to everything else. It can also mean the page your browser opens on startup.

In Japanese, ホームページ (hōmupēji) means something much bigger: the entire website. When a Japanese company says 会社のホームページ (the company’s home page), they mean their whole site — every page, every section. The word ballooned from “one page” to “all the pages.”

Why the Meaning Stretched

ホームページ spread through Japan in the late 1990s, right as the internet reached ordinary households. At the time, many sites really were just a single page — so “home page” and “website” pointed at the same thing. As sites grew into dozens of pages, the word never shrank back. It kept meaning “the whole online presence.”

This is why a Japanese speaker might say 個人のホームページ (a personal home page) to mean someone’s entire multi-page site, which sounds slightly off to an English ear expecting just one page.

HP, Site, and the Generational Shift

In writing, Japanese often shortens ホームページ to HP — on name cards, signage, and company brochures — though people almost never read the letters aloud; in conversation they just say ホームページ. Watch out, too, because the same two letters also mean “hit points” in games. Younger people increasingly say サイト (saito, site) or ウェブサイト (website) instead, while ホームページ keeps a slightly older, business-letter feel.

Fun Fact

If you tell an English-speaking web developer “I made my home page,” they’ll picture a single page. Tell a Japanese person the same thing and they’ll imagine you built an entire site. The technical English term and the Japanese everyday term drifted apart — and in Japan, the bigger meaning won.