"Home School" or "Homeschool"?

Have you ever wondered if its two words or one? Leave it to Ruth Beechick to come along with the answer. Sometimes it seems she has all the answers. What a godly woman. Through her writings she has blessed me over and over again. Thanks Ms. Ruth!!

Weekly Language Tip by Ruth Beechick, Curriculum Specialist

Homeschool was not a word three decades ago. If you checked a dictionary, you would have written the adjective home and the noun school. Together that made "home school." If you wanted to coin an adjective, you would hyphenate the words: home-school student or home-school books. Or coin a noun the same way: run a home-school.
Separate words or hyphenated words--that's all that was legal in those days. But homeschoolers and their writers proliferated rapidly. Some remained legal; others ignored the rules and joined the words. I phoned the New York Times and asked how they wrote home school. An editor said, "If it's not in the dictionary, we don't use it."
Well, a year or so later the one-word form was in the dictionary, thanks to innovative homeschoolers who used it so widely that dictionary makers could not ignore it. (My online dictionary hasn't learned this yet.) Once we had the noun homeschool, it was easy to turn it into a verb. Writers of English do that all the time, dictionary or no. A recent example is to say, "I Googled it." That's much more efficient than trying to use the noun: "I put it into the search engine called Google."
So homeschool began as two words, then was coined into a hyphenated term, and then with wide use became a joined word in the dictionary. That's the path that many words take to enter the language. High school has not taken that path. But your homeschool (adj.) student can homeschool (v.) in your homeschool (n.). And you can use related words like homeschooler and homeschoolish and the derivatives of plural and past tense and participles.
You are changing the dictionary and, more importantly, you are changing the world. Tell you children that homeschool and high school are handled differently.
--Ruth

http://www.mottmedia.com/pages/publications.asp?Pub=beechick

Taken from "The Homeschool Minute"