nowaday

English

Adjective

nowaday (not comparable)

1. Existing nowadays; current, present; contemporary.
   • 1984, David Farrelly, The book of bamboo‎^[1], page 83:

     Many an ancient commonplace is weird news to the nowaday ear.

   • 2005, Amelia Glaser, David Weintraub, Yankl Salant, Proletpen: America’s Rebel Yiddish Poets:

     The red sealing wax drips and flames: a piece of the heart I hold in my hand over the candle of my nowaday sorrow.

   • 2007, James McCourt, Now Voyagers: The Night Sea Journey‎^[2], page 306:

     Or that these (shall we go ahead and call both outcomes issues) would be the nowaday worries, with no time out?

   • 2009, John B. Olson, Powers‎^[3], page 260:

     “What are you talking about? What gift? And what does it have to do with Gypsies? “He said the true Gypsies—not to be mixed up with the nowaday Tinkers—were very people intuitive. […] ”

Synonyms

• (from the present time): current, present

Adverb

nowaday (not comparable)

1. Alternative form of nowadays
   • 1870, The Illustrated London News‎^[4], volume 48, page 679:

     Of this we may be sure, that the most haphazard guess at the cause by the most unlettered, nowaday, will be nearer the mark-thanks to the diffusion of knowledge—than were the speculations of the learned, ages ago […]

   • 1936, Charles Morrow Wilson, “Rabble Rouser”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name)‎^[5], page 247:

     thinking of some kind of a program for social legislation. You get what I mean, building up a vast reservoir of — better folks. Nowaday we're beginning to control the breeding of animals.

   • 1999, Brian Keith Jackson, “Walking Through Mirrors”, in (Please provide the book title or journal name)‎^[6], page 212:

     I suppose I could; women havin' babies much later nowaday

Usage notes

• Archaic in standard English, nowaday is principally used by non-native speakers and in reported speech in fiction.

Noun

nowaday

1. (rare) The present period; contemporary times.
   • 1987, W.J.Aerts, “Appendix: The Latin-Greek Wordlist in MS 236 of the Municipal Library of Avranches, FOL. 97v”, in Reginald Allen Brown, editor, Proceedings of the Battle Conference 1986, Boydell & Brewer, →ISBN, page 69:

     If so, it should be noted that ουντυγχάνω does not exist in nowaday's South Italian, and, probably, did not either in medieval South Italian (though it is not excluded, of course, because during the presence of the Byzantines in (Southern) Italy a greater influence of the Byzantine koine of that time can be postulated).

   • 1995, Cynthia Mills Coté, Amazing grace: the story of some Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, the Stevensons, Flemings, and others, who migrated from North Carolina to Missouri in 1819‎^[7], page 120:

     When I think back over the one hundred years that the Stevensons lived there, the things we had to deal with and use, would give these safety people of nowaday a blood hemorrhage.

   • 2008, Edra Ziesk, The Trespasser‎^[8], page 25:

     Sometimes Heke was living in the nowaday, sometimes he was with Rudy and Royl, his mother and father, who had both passed years back, and with his sister Narcissa in the long ago.

Anagrams

• Nodaway