Day care or daycare?
day care is a noun meaning “Alternative form of daycare”; daycare is a noun meaning “Daytime supervision, usually of children or pets”. day care is written as two words and daycare as one word; they are used differently.
What is the difference between day care and daycare?
| day care | daycare | |
|---|---|---|
| Part of speech | noun | noun |
| Meaning | Alternative form of daycare | Daytime supervision, usually of children or pets A daycare centre |
| Example | none recorded | none recorded |
| Forms | none | daycares |
| Pronunciation | not recorded | /ˈdeɪkeə(ɹ)/ |
| In writing | not counted (the list counts single words) | 2.0 times per million words |
Sources: day care and daycare 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 day care and daycare
day care
- 1
Alternative form of daycare
daycare
- 1
Daytime supervision, usually of children or pets
- 2
A daycare centre
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, day care or daycare?
day care is a phrase, which the list of single words does not count; daycare 2.0 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 day care vs daycare?
“day care vs daycare” is searched about 90 times a month on Google and 10 on Bing in the United States. Google counts close variants of a query together (“daycare vs day care”, “day care or daycare”).
Sources: Google Ads keyword data through DataForSEO and Microsoft Advertising keyword data through DataForSEO, the average month from September 2025 to August 2026.