Nowadays

How to spell nowadays

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce nowadays

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does nowadays mean?

1. adverbAt the present time, in contrast with the past.

Nowadays in a sentence

• Most people pay for groceries with a card nowadays.

• Nowadays it is rare to find a phone box on the high street.

Where does nowadays come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Nowadays grew out of the Middle English phrase 'now adayes', literally 'now on days', which writers used from the 1300s to mean 'in these present times'. The middle element is not the article 'a' but a faded form of the old preposition 'on', the same shrunken 'a' that survives in words like 'aboard' (on board) and 'ashore' (on shore). The final '-s' was a genitive or adverbial ending that English once attached to express 'by day' or 'of days', much as it still does in 'always' and 'sometimes'. Over the centuries the three little words were squeezed together into a single adverb, which is exactly why people pause over its spelling: the buried 'a' in the middle has no obvious meaning today and is easy to drop or to expand back into separate words. By the early modern period 'nowadays' was firmly established as one word meaning 'at the present time, as opposed to the past'.

How the word is built

• now (the present time)
• a- (an old worn-down form of 'on')
• days (plural of 'day')