Child care or childcare?
child care is a noun meaning “Alternative form of childcare”; childcare is a noun meaning “The act, practice, or occupation of supervising and taking care of young…”. child care is written as two words and childcare as one word; they are used differently.
What is the difference between child care and childcare?
| child care | childcare | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | noun | noun |
| Meaning | Alternative form of childcare | The act, practice, or occupation of supervising and taking care of young children A place where young children are supervised while away from their parents or guardians |
| Example | none recorded | none recorded |
| Forms | none | childcares |
| Pronunciation | not recorded | not recorded |
| In writing | not counted (the list counts single words) | 2.5 times per million words |
Sources: child care and childcare in the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
Every current meaning of child care and childcare
child care
- 1
Alternative form of childcare
childcare
- 1
The act, practice, or occupation of supervising and taking care of young children
- 2
A place where young children are supervised while away from their parents or guardians
Source: the English Wiktionary, dump of September 2, 2026 (CC BY-SA 4.0); obsolete, archaic, dialect and rare senses left out.
Which is more common, child care or childcare?
child care is a phrase, which the list of single words does not count; childcare 2.5 times per million words.
Source: written frequency: wordfreq 3.1 (a 2021 snapshot of Wikipedia, subtitles, news, books, web text and social media).
How many people search child care vs childcare?
“child care vs childcare” is searched about 20 times a month on Bing (Google reports it together with close variants, so it has no figure of its own) in the United States.
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.