I think its reasonable to refer to the reference implementation of Python (CPython) as just "Python". The compilation to bytecode is an intermediate step becaus

I think its reasonable to refer to the reference implementation of Python (CPython) as just "Python". The compilation to bytecode is an intermediate step because Python specifies a virtual machine. The language is definitely interpreted though. Its completely accurate to call Python an interpreted language. There's no version of Python that I know of (including PyPy) that ever produces compiled machine executable binaries prior to runtime.