Other forms: dailies
Daily means every day, one after another with no gaps. Your daily walk to the station, the daily news, the daily pill you take with breakfast.
Daily is an adjective and an adverb with the same shape — a daily paper, and trains that run daily — so there is no second ending to add. As a noun, a daily is a newspaper that comes out every day: the story made the front page of every national daily. Two set phrases carry it: your daily bread, the food or money you need to live, and the daily grind, the dull repetition of work. Note the pairing with numbers, the way medicine labels are written — twice daily, three times daily.
1adjectivedailyHappening or done every day.~96%
“The daily meeting starts at nine sharp.”
synonyms: everyday
2adverbdayEvery day.~2%
“The tablets should be taken twice daily.”
3nounnewspaperA newspaper published every day.~2%
“Every national daily led with the same photograph.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: everyday
Daily is homegrown. Old English dæglic, from Proto-Germanic dagalikaz, is simply day with the ending -ly stuck on, and the same build turns up all over the family — Dutch dagelijks, German taglich, Swedish daglig.
Proto-Germanic
*dagalīkaz — daily
Proto-West Germanic
*dagalīk
Old English
dæġlīċ
Middle English
dayly
English, today
daily
From Middle English dayly, from Old English dæġlīċ, from Proto-West Germanic dagalīk, from Proto-Germanic dagalīkaz (“daily”), equivalent to day + ly. Cognate with Scots dayly, daly (“daily”), German Low German dagelk, dagelik (“daily”), Dutch dagelijks (“daily”), German täglich (“daily”), Danish daglig (“daily”), Swedish daglig (“daily”), Icelandic daglegur (“daily”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA