When it comes to expressions of time, when we say all day, all morning / evening / week, this means the same thing as the whole day, the whole morning, etc.
I know that all the time means frequently or from time to time; for example, I do this all the time, but suppose you lost a round to a girl in a game and now you want to make an excuse, so you'd say, "She was cheating the whole time." But can you also say, "She was cheating all time (or) all the time"?
Cambridge Dictionary gives this example:
where it reads: She complains all of the time and She complains the whole of the time. I haven't heard either expression, but they mention it as though these meant the same thing.
Is it indeed the case that these really do mean the same thing? Is all the time (which means frequently or from time to time) different from all of the time or the whole of the time?
My questions are:
Can we also use all time to mean "the whole time”?
If we can say all day, all morning, all summer, can we also then say all January/February etc., all March 2nd and the whole January etc., the whole of March the 2nd?
If we can say "All of the time", is it also possible to say "All the day or all of the day"? For example: She complained all of the day or all the day to mean the same thing as “She complained all day.”
I know that all means each and every, and that it's used for things that you can subdivide such as All (of) the parents came to the party (each and every one of them) whereas the whole means the entirety of something and is not used for uncountable nouns. This means you can say "He ate all the sugar" (as sugar can be subdivided - you can have some of it now and have the rest later) but you can't say "He ate the whole sugar" (because sugar is a non-count or mass noun), but you can say "He ate the whole packet of sugar" (because a packet is countable by virtue of its indefinite article).
But these basics doesn't seem to apply when we are dealing with time expressions. Why is that? What's the reason?
