I can see around me that the term everyday life is the correct one used broadly.
But why shouldn't it be every-day life? That seems to fit with the grammatical pattern of similar constructions:
- Everyday is not a word in itself but should be every and day, as in:
It happens every day
- Just like inbetween is not a word but should rather be in and between, as in:
You are standing in between those two
When I use these sets of two words descriptively in front of a noun (I don't know the terminology for this, but I hope you can catch the meaning from the question), I would merge the two words with a dash:
- Every-day life is hard.
- The in-between people are gone.
This is apparently correct in the latter example but not in the former. What is the difference? Why is everyday life not written as every-day life?
Best Answer
Your understanding of hyphenation with adjective phrases is correct, but everyday is a word.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/everyday
So then, why is everyday written as one word, while other phrasal adjectives are written with hyphens? Just because it's so old and so common. The use of everyday seems to go back to the 17th century (Etymology Online Dictionary).
Note that people often incorrectly write "everyday" when they mean "every day." For example (all taken from Stack Overflow posts): "I would like to know if Customer Ben received unique Item 1 everyday", "I need the system to run the following code everyday", "I want to run a Job Service everyday daily at 6:00 AM."
My favorite, which I read on an advertisement for a hostel in Brazil: "Everyday Monkeys" (I was looking forward to exotic monkeys, not your everyday monkeys).