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Nowadays, these days or today?

We can use nowadays, these days or today as adverbs meaning ‘at the present time, in comparison with the past’:

  • I don’t watch TV very much nowadays. There’s so much rubbish on. It’s not like it used to be.
  • Young people nowadays don’t respect their teachers any more.
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Take care to spell nowadays correctly: not ‘nowdays’.

These days is more informal:

  • These days you never see a young person give up their seat for an older person on the bus. That’s what I was taught to do when I was a kid.
  • Pop singers these days don’t seem to last more than a couple of months, then you never hear of them again.

Today is slightly more formal:

  • Apartments today are often designed for people with busy lifestyles.

We can use today, but not nowadays or these days, with the possessive ’s construction before a noun, or with of after a noun. This use is quite formal:

  • Today’s family structures are quite different from those of 100 years ago.
  • The youth of today have never known what life was like without computers.
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We don’t use nowadays, these days or today as adjectives:

  • Cars nowadays/these days/today are much more efficient and economical.
  • Not: The nowadays cars / The these days cars / The today’s cars …