“everyday” vs. “every day”
Write "everyday" as one word only when it directly describes a noun as ordinary or routine; write "every day" as two words whenever you mean "each day."
everyday
"Everyday," written as one word, is an adjective meaning ordinary, routine, or commonplace ("everyday shoes," "an everyday occurrence"). It always sits directly in front of a noun it's describing and never stands alone as the main point of a sentence. As a single compound adjective, "everyday" is a relatively modern formation, becoming standardized as one word mainly over the 19th and 20th centuries as English increasingly fused common adjective-noun combinations into single compound words for frequently paired concepts.
every day
"Every day," written as two words, is a phrase meaning "each day" and functions as an adverbial phrase of time, telling you how often something happens ("I run every day"). Unlike the compound adjective, this is simply the ordinary determiner "every" plus the ordinary noun "day," a combination that has always been written as two separate words because it's genuinely two separate words doing two separate grammatical jobs, not a fused compound.
The real distinction
The test is purely grammatical, not about meaning or formality: "everyday" (one word) must sit directly before a noun as a describing word, while "every day" (two words) answers the question "how often?" and could be replaced by "each day" or "daily" without breaking the sentence. A reliable substitution test: if you can swap in "daily" and the sentence still works exactly the same way, you need the two-word "every day"; if the phrase is describing a noun the way "ordinary" or "routine" would, you need the one-word "everyday." This is one of the more common compound-word errors in professional and marketing writing specifically, because "everyday" as a punchy one-word adjective shows up constantly in advertising copy ("everyday low prices"), and writers sometimes then default to the one-word spelling even in sentences that actually need the two-word adverbial phrase ("we offer low prices everyday" should be "every day"). Because the one-word adjective form is so visually common in retail and advertising contexts, some writers develop a habit of using it by default, which is precisely backward from how frequently each form is actually needed in ordinary prose — the two-word time phrase is arguably more common in everyday (no pun intended) writing than the one-word adjective. Editors reviewing marketing copy specifically flag this pair, since a wrongly fused "everyday" in a sentence meaning "each day" is a small but noticeable error that undermines a brand's credibility in exactly the kind of polished copy meant to look professional.
Examples with “everyday”
- These are just my everyday work clothes.
- Traffic jams are an everyday frustration here.
- It's an everyday task, nothing special.
- She wore her everyday makeup to the interview.
- This is an everyday kitchen tool, not a specialty item.
- He treated the award like an everyday event.
- These are everyday prices, not a special sale.
- It's become an everyday habit for most of us.
Examples with “every day”
- I go for a run every day before work.
- She checks her email every day, even on weekends.
- We eat dinner together every day as a family.
- He practices piano every day for an hour.
- The bus arrives at the same time every day.
- They water the garden every day in summer.
- I take the same route to work every day.
- She writes in her journal every day before bed.
Memory trick
If you could insert "ordinary" in its place and the sentence still makes sense, write the one-word "everyday"; if you could insert "daily" in its place instead, write the two-word "every day." One more useful check: try splitting the phrase and inserting another word in the middle, like "every single day" — if that insertion still makes sense, you need the two-word phrase, since a true one-word adjective can never be split apart like that. A final sanity check worth running on marketing copy specifically: read the sentence aloud and listen for whether the phrase is naming a routine timing (every day) or describing a plain, unremarkable quality (everyday) — the two readings rarely overlap once you say the sentence out loud.