To me, "everyday" and "every day" mean two different things. Someone who says they are "in an everyday job" doesn't mean they work Monday to Sunday; they mean their job is unexciting, humdrum.

An advertisement I saw on the side of a bus this morning for a children's TV programme said "Watch it everyday at 4.30."

I think they have the have the same meaning, but one is more common than the other. The humdrum meaning is just an extension of the literal meaning.

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Originally posted by Graham Nice:
I think they have the have the same meaning, but one is more common than the other. The humdrum meaning is just an extension of the literal meaning.

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I disagree.
Everyday (one word) means commonplace - it's used like any other adjective "an everyday occurence".

Every day, two words is an adverbial phrase. It means exactly what it says - every day without exception. "I do it every day".

This source treats them as being the same; this one treats them as being different.

I'm with Bob on this, but as Graham says, the two concepts so related that a word meaning one would tend to acquire the second meaning. For example, Wordcrafter noted here that quotidian has both these meanings.

So I'm on the fence. How do others feel?

Wordnerd

Your rhymezone source treats them differently as well. Compare your link (for every day) with this one (for everyday).

I agree entirely that they're distinct; and a literate person should feel the difference as they would be printed in books.

But the distinction seems to be dying or dead outside books, since "everyday at" should almost always be an error... but it has five million web hits, almost as many as "every day at".

"Do/did/done it every day" all come up about three times as commonly as the same with "everyday".

In the other direction, "everyday experience" is about twelve times more common than "every day experience". Same ratio with "life".

So the adjective is still used in its book-form, but the one-word form is fast encroaching on the two-word adverb.

When aput said, "everyday at" should almost always be an error... but it has five million web hits, almost as many as "every day at", I found it surprising, checked, and found that something odd is going. Aput is correct: with google the two terms give roughly the same number of hits. But switch to checking in google-news, and the results are 10-to-1 in favor of the proper usage. Conversely, in google's "froogle" search the hits are 5-to-1 the other way, in favor of the improper usage.

Curiouser and curiouser: googling, etc. the improper phrase gives you many sites that in fact do not contain that phrase! For example, at the moment the top google hit for "everyday at" is

wholesale watch at Jamboro.com wholesale watch, designer watch, cheap watch, exclusive wholesale watch, worldwide, jamboro, free, sample, young, nice, finishing, wholesaler, quartz, analog ... www.jamboro.com/ - 8k - Cached - Similar pages,

but if you go to the cache it says These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: everyday at.

I can only conclude that for some reason Google doesn't handle this query properly.
(By the way, my google preferences are set to English-only, moderate filtering.)

This message has been edited. Last edited by: shufitz,

When I do Web-hit tests I sometimes rerun them to eliminate what seem to be biases in the top results; so there was some song mentioning "bus stop" that showed up a lot in one, but excluding that made no real difference.

A lot of the "everyday at" hits were commercial sites, and I wondered about what I might exclude there. But they all looked different: it's not as if it was one site or good or place multiply referenced. It just seems common in commercial use. Well, commercial sites probably have a lot more internal cross-referencing than most, and perhaps a listing of all their wares and pitches in META tags on a front page that will take you inside. But such searches are annoying for linguists actually trying to find the phrase where it's used.

As one who is probably more inexperienced at googling, I will just answer this as I see it. I agree with Bob. Everyday as an adjective means humdrum. Yet, doing something every day, as an adverb, is quite distinct.