This is something that has plagued Wordpress for a long time in my opinion and is one of those left overs from when Wordpress was strictly ‘blog software’. When using functions like wp_list_categories or even the Categories widget, Wordpress inserts the word ‘category’ into the urls for no apparent reason. While I am sure there is a reason, I don’t know why the developers over in the Wordpress camp have not made some way to remove this behavior from the admin interface. You can change ‘category’ to another word of your choice but you cannot remove it without editing some of Wordpress’ code.

Luckily there are people out there that are just as annoyed about this issue as I was. So annoyed in fact that someone has done a great job of laying out in simple terms what code needs to be edited what settings should be changed. Take a look at the article if you interested in getting rid of this issue with Wordpress.

Hopefully at some point this will be added into the core of Wordpress to change this behavior, but for now at least we have a fix. I have tried this myself and seems to work without any issues. If you have tried this I would be interested to know how it turned out for you.