I received this query by e-mail and quickly shot off a reply: "You use everyday as an adjective and as an adverb."
After I hit send, I wondered whether I should verify that this distinction is always true, so I looked it up in The Oxford Dictionary of American Usage and Style. To my relief, I had it right. Here are examples of how to use everyday versus every day.
- You may well use this advanced program feature every day.
- This is an everyday fix for common system problems.
You can tell you need the solid version (no space) if everyday is followed by a noun. An everyday exercise, an everyday occurrence. You can tell you need every day open (spaced) when it answers the question "when does the action of this sentence occur?"
- Things like this happen every day.
- Every day he saves the files to the external hard drive.
Join Jennie in our online classes (she'll be teaching two upcoming classes for IconLogic): Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts and Editing with Microsoft Word 2007.