nowadays
Definition, pronunciation, etymology, and usage for the English word. Free spelling reference powered by Wiktionary.
Letters
8 characters
Language
English
word origin
Source
Wiktionary
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Detailed reference entry for the English word "nowadays", 8-letters, with pronunciation in International Phonetic Alphabet notation, etymology traced through Germanic and Romance roots where applicable, common misspelling variants catalogued from Hunspell error dictionaries, and usage frequency ranked against the top 100,000 English words in the Wordfreq corpus. PlainSpell covers English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German spelling with confusable-pair detection that highlights visually and phonetically similar words. This entry for "nowadays" includes synonyms, antonyms, homophones, and cross-language translation pointers sourced from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org extract. Whether you are verifying the correct spelling of "nowadays" for academic writing, checking homophone confusion, or exploring etymological origins, this page provides a citation-backed, free reference that requires no sign-up.
nowadays is anEnglishadv. It means: At the present time; in the current era. Pronounced /ˈnaʊ.ə.deɪz/. It ranks #5,989 in English word frequency.
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Browse all word comparisons →| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | nowadays |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Adv |
| IPA | /ˈnaʊ.ə.deɪz/ |
| Letters | 8 |
| Frequency rank | #5,989 |
| Misspellings tracked | 12 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Frequency rank visualization
Spelling & Dictionary Insight
The English entry for nowadays is 8 letters long, classified as anadv, and transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet as /ˈnaʊ.ə.deɪz/. Corpus data places it at rank #5,989 in overall English word frequency, indicating it appears regularly in written and spoken text.The dominant gloss from Wiktionary reads: "At the present time; in the current era.".
Our Hunspell-derived misspelling index lists 12 documented wrong-spelling variants for nowadays, with forms such as "nnowadays", "noawdays", and "nowaadys". Each variant represents a distinct typo pattern that appears often enough in corpora to be worth flagging, typically a doubled-consonant error, a silent-letter drop, or a vowel substitution.It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, which tends to mean the word is visually distinctive enough to stand on its own.
Etymologically, the entry records: From now + adays. Root origin matters for spelling because borrowed morphemes (Greek, Latin, Old French, Old English) carry their source-language orthographic conventions into modern English, which is why historical etymology is often the cleanest predictor of whether a cluster like "-ough", "-eau", or "-tion" will appear. For readers arriving here from a spelling check, the authoritative guidance is: the correct English form is nowadays, spelled N-O-W-A-D-A-Y-S, and any other sequence of those letters, regardless of how natural it feels, is a misspelling in standard orthography.
Definition
- 1At the present time; in the current era.
Etymology
From now + adays.
This word in other languages
Common misspellings
Also misspelled as: nnowadays,noawdays,nowaadys,nowadasy,nowadayss,nowadayys,nowaddays,nowadyas,nowdaays,nowwadays,nwoadays,onwadays
Misspelling Pattern Breakdown
Relative frequency of common misspelling types for nowadays
Misspelling Variants of "nowadays"
Frequency rank: #5,989 in English
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Nearby English words
Other entries that begin with the letter N in our English index: