Are we talking about a regular wordpress install where you;ve download the software and installed it in your own hosting or a hosted version like at wordpress.com? The answer really depends on where you;re hosted.
I think the word category always shows up unless you hack your wordpress files (not recommended) or just use a plugin
Name the category. "Category" only shows up as a default if you haven't made any categories...and if you don't customize your permalink settings.
Login to your admin panel. then go to setting-->permalinks. here you will 5 options to set permalink. select "Custom Structure" option and set it as you want.
This does not accomplish what the OP is trying to do as well. The only way to get rid of "category" from your permalink structure is to use a plugin or hack your category-template.php you can place %category% in your permalink structure and that renames the category to what you have named it, but there will still the the word category in there. Lets say you have one parent category named Blogs, then 3 child categories in a menu named Wordpress, Blogger, and LiveJournal. if you want to see blogs your site would be - hxxp://sitename.com/category/blogs/ If you wanted to see Wordpress it would be hxxp://sitename.com/category/blogs/wordpress/ No matter how you change the permalink structure in the Permalinks tab of wordpress. You HAVE to use a plugin or hack your file to get rid of the actual word category.
Unless of course this is a wordpress.com we're talking about and then you;re out of luck. That's why I asked the question that I did. And still await a reply.
It is extremely simple. Go to permalinks settings in your wordpress admin. Then enter the word which you want to use instead of category in the category base and update it. Check the main wordpress screen and you should see the new word instead of category.
wow, seems like the only one with a clue here is duanehaas Hey duanehaas, I actually got errors when i activated Top Level Categories. Seen this before?
Won't work on wp.com blogs. One of the reasons why I asked my question. Thanks by the way for reinforcing the poor support that occurs around here. The actual errors you are seeing would be helpful.
Top level categories doesn't play nice with a couple of plugins I have noticed. I just recently changed to custom permalinks using /%category%/%postname% (i tried to use /%category%/%postname%/ but for some reason it wouldnt work with the extra / ) and they broke my site as well so I switched to a different plugin instead of top level categories, wp no category base is the new plugin I used and all is working correctly now