OK

For other uses, see OK and Okay (disambiguation).

Okay is an informal term of approval, assent, or acknowledgment, sometimes written as OK or O.K.. (See also A-OK.) When used to describe the quality of a thing, it denotes being fit for purpose ("this is okay to send out") or of a quality which is acceptable but not great ("the food was okay"). When used in dialogue, it can denote compliance ("okay, I'll do that"), agreement ("okay, that's good"), a wish to defuse a situation or calm someone ("okay, it's not that bad"), or even formal approval ("you're okay to do that"). As with most slang, its meaning is determined by context.

The origins of okay are not known with certainty, and have been the subject of much discussion and academic interest over the years. While it originated as an English language word it is commonly used in many other languages in the 21st Century.

Earliest documented examples

Disproven

The earliest claimed usage of okay is a 1790 court record from Sumner County, Tennessee, USA discovered in 1859 by a Tennessee historian named Albigence Waldo Putnam, in which Andrew Jackson apparently said:

"proved a bill of sale from Hugh McGary to Gasper Mansker, for a Negro man, which was O.K."

However, the record is hand-written rather than typed, and James Parton's 1860 biography of Jackson suggested—and Woodford Heflin's (the Dictionary of American English staffer in charge of the OK entry) 1941 photographic analysis confirmed—that it is really a poorly written O.R., which was the abbreviation used for Order Recorded.

Accepted

Allen Walker Read established that the earliest verified use of okay in print was 1839, in the March 23 edition of the Boston Morning Post (an American newspaper). The announcement of a trip by the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society (a "frolicsome group" according to Read) received attention from the Boston papers. Charles Gordon Greene wrote about the event using the line that is widely regarded as the first instance of this strain of okay, complete with gloss:

The above is from the Providence Journal, the editor of which is a little too quick on the trigger, on this occasion. We said not a word about our deputation passing "through the city" of Providence.—We said our brethren were going to New York in the Richmond, and they did go, as per Post of Thursday. The "Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Bells", is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train-band, would have his "contribution box," et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.

Read gives a number of subsequent appearances in print: seven were accompanied ("glossed") with variations on "all correct" such as "oll korrect" or "ole kurreck"; five appeared with no accompanying explanation, suggesting that the word was expected to be well-known to readers and possibly in common colloquial use at the time.

A year later, supporters of the American Democratic political party claimed during the 1840 United States presidential election that it stood for "Old Kinderhook". "Kinderhook" was a nickname for a Democratic presidential candidate, Martin Van Buren, a native of Kinderhook, NY. "'Vote for OK' was snappier than using his Dutch name." In response, Whig opponents attributed OK, in the sense of "Oll Korrect", to Andrew Jackson's bad spelling.

The country-wide publicity surrounding the election appears to have been a critical event in okay's history, widely and suddenly popularizing it across America.

However, and importantly for one candidate etymology, earlier documented examples exist of African slaves in America using phonetically identical or strikingly similar words in a similar sense to okay. See Wolof: waw-kay, below.

Etymology

A wide variety of etymologies have been proposed for okay. None is unanimously agreed upon. However, most are generally agreed to be unlikely or anachronistic.

Allen Walker Read, revisiting and rebutting his own work of 20 years earlier, contributed a major survey of the early history of okay in a series of six articles in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964. He tracked the spread and evolution of the word in American newspapers and other written documents, and later the rest of the world. He also documented controversy surrounding okay and the history of its folk etymologies, both of which are intertwined with the history of the word itself.

A key observation is that, at the time of its first appearance in print, a broader fad existed in America of "comical misspellings" and of forming and employing acronyms and initialisms. These were apparently based on direct phonetic representation of (some) people's colloquial speech patterns. Examples at the time included K.Y. for "know yuse" and N.S.M.J. for "'nough said 'moung [sic] gentlemen", "Bosting" for "Boston" and "Vell vot of it!".

"The abbreviation fad began in Boston in the summer of 1838 ... OFM, "our first men", and used expressions like NG, "no go", GT, "gone to Texas", and SP, "small potatoes". Many of the abbreviated expressions were exaggerated misspellings, a stock in trade of the humorists of the day. One predecessor of OK was OW, "oll wright", and there was also KY, "know yuse", KG, "know go", and NS, "nuff said".

The general fad may have existed in spoken or informal written American English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers. OK's original presentation as "all correct" was later varied with spellings such as "Oll Korrect" or even "Ole Kurreck". Deliberate word play was associated with the acronym fad and was a yet broader contemporary American fad.

Improbable or refuted etymologies

These range from the colloquial to the fanciful to the enthusiastic to the faintly humorous. Some American literature refers to some of these as "folk etymologies".

• It has been suggested that in World War II the term "zero killed" was used when a unit suffered no casualties in combat, and that this was then shortened to 0K. This proposed etymology is grossly anachronistic, since by this time the term had been widely used for a full century.
• The same theory has also been applied to Gen. Custer's telegraphed reports of platoon casualties whereby OK "oh key" meant "0 (zero) key (killed)". It may therefore be an acronym for no killed in a platoon AKA P0K or "platoon fit to fight", a common telegraph message. However, this is also anachronistic, as Custer was born more than 8 months after OK appeared in the Boston Morning Post.
• In German newspapers and printing the term OK has been in use at least since the 1800s; it stood for "ohne Korrektur" (without correction).
• According to William Courson, the English use of "OK" may derive from the Russian expression Ochen Korosho ("All is fine").
• Another story is that the expression came from a quality control system in some company, in which some inspector with the initials O.K. provided final approval. Some versions of this story include implausible employee names such as "Omar Kulemsky" or impossibly anachronistic choices for the company such as the Ford Motor Company, where a German immigrant named Otto Kaiser or Otto Krüger or Oskar Krause would inspect each car coming off the assembly line at a plant in Michigan and chalk his initials on the front windshield if it was "OK".
• In Greek, O.K. is a correctly-spelled abbreviation for the expression, Ola Kala (Ὅλα Καλά, ΟΚ), "everything is fine", which has the same meaning as the American English "okay". It is possible that Greek sailors used Ola Kala in American ports. It is also said that "O.K." was written on the ships or other places to show that the ships are ready.
• The word of assent in Occitan is òc (from Latin hoc), as opposed to oïl (< Lat. "hoc ille), the ancestor of the modern French oui, from the langue d'oïl of Northern France. However, before the word "okay" appeared in American English, the final consonant in Occitan òc tended to become silent, leading to the two possible pronunciations: [ɔ / ɔk]. In any case, it is very unlikely that this Occitan word is the origin of the Bostonian "okay".
• William Richardson recorded his journey from Boston to New Orleans in his 1815 diary. Transcriptions of the diary show "Arrived at Princeton, a handsome little village, o.k. and at Trenton where we dined at 1p.m." - although some have proposed that this showed the use of the expression in 1815, the original manuscript shows that this was actually part of some alterations that may have been added by Richardson (or someone else), possibly even after 1840 when the term had come into common use. Another possibility is that the writing is of a.h., referring to "a handsome", but there are many objections to this theory.
• The Finnish word for "correct" is "oikea".
• Early ship-builders would mark the timber they prepared, and the first to be laid was marked "OK Number 1", meaning "outer keel No. 1".
• An author in the Nottingham Journal in 1943 suggests that OK is simply an adaptation of the old Scottish expression: och aye. The Scottish expression derives from och, meaning an exclamation of surprise and aye meaning yes, and has been in existence since perhaps the 16th century.
• In early England, the last harvest loads brought in from the fields were known as hoacky or horkey. It was also the name given to harvest-home, which was the feast which followed the last loads brought in. The satisfactory completion of harvest was therefore known as hoacky, which was soon (at least according to an article in the Daily Telegraph in 1935) shortened to OK.
• Probably the earliest suggestion comes from the Greek. The two Greek letters omega and khi appear in a work called Geoponica in 920AD as being a magical incantation (when repeated twice) against fleas.
• Obediah Kelly was an early railway freighter. He is known to have signed bills of lading with his initials, OK, and in railway circles OK came to mean that something had been authorised.
• During the Civil War, the US War Department bought supplies of crackers from a company called Orrins-Kendall. Their initials appeared on the boxes, and as the crackers were of a particularly high standard, the letters OK became synonymous with "all right". This theory was originally put forward in a publication called Linguist, from the Horace Mann School for Boys in New York, although it has subsequently appeared in a number of other publications.
• During the 1840 United States presidential election, President Martin Van Buren's re-election campaign's publicity used his old nickname: "Vote for O.K.", short for his nickname "Old Kinderhook" (see above). His opponents satirized this with a range of alternative and pointed etymologies: Out of Kash, Out of Kredit, and Out of Klothes all became identified with Van Buren's campaign. And on the floor of the House of Representatives, a congressman from Illinois suggested it meant Orful Kalamity.
• Several centuries before its first appearance, Norwegian and Danish sailors used an Anglo-Saxon word hogfor, which meant ready for sea. This was frequently shortened to HG, which in turn would have been pronounced hag-gay. A German (Pennsylvanian Dutch) accent, common in north-eastern America in the 19th century (and reflected in comical misspellings cited by Read such as "Vell, vot ov it!") would render this as as OK to an English-speaking listener.

More Probable etymologies

There are three candidate etymologies which are widely regarded as the primary candidates for okay's derivation. The first has been extensively argued for by Read; the remaining two differ materially from other candidates in that they:

• have widespread verifiable pre-existing documented usage,
• have verifiable geographic overlaps with okay's first documented instances,
• have equivalent meanings,
• do not fit over-neatly into contemporaneous or subsequent political or cultural circumstances, and
• are remarkably similar in pronunciation to okay (having due regard to the danger of false coincidence, which is endemic to colloquial etymology)

They are:

1. the acronym of the "comically misspelled" oll korrect
2. the Choctaw word okeh
3. the Wolof and Bantu word waw-kay or the Mande (aka "Mandinke" or "Mandingo") phrase o ke

Oll korrect

This is historically the most commonly cited etymology, as it is Read's own conclusion and became widely known following his landmark publications in 1963-1964.

The chief strength of this etymology is its clear written record.

A problem with this etymology is the implication that common usage was driven by the written appearance of a geographically and socially isolated slang term which was alien to the rest of the country. Colloquial terms tend to move into written works as their growing usage renders them sufficiently common, rather than the other way round. The relatively slow take-up of the term by other English-speaking countries emphasize this pattern.

Another problem with this etymology is that the "comical misspellings" were phonetic. "Orl Korrect" clearly suggests that what is being comically misspelled was heard from someone speaking with a non-standard accent, either deliberately or habitually. The semantic similarity between "orl korrect" and the German (Pennsylvanian Dutch) "alles in Ordnung" ("everything is in order/all is correct") should be noted. However, at that time this accent was not widespread in America outside the north-east, which would have tended to reduce the rate of wider adoption of the now-arbitrary slang.

However, the great migration of peoples form the North East to the Western United States and the settling of the frontier lands was occurring during this time and some time after, which would have greatly increased the spread of this saying. Also the vast majority of the population of the country was located in the North East at this time thus making unnecessary for the term to spread in order to be maintained in the American lexicon.

Choctaw: okeh

The underlying theme here is English-speaking Americans taking up a locally-heard Native American word.

According to Read, an English professor at the University of Alabama named W. S. Wyman in 1885 attributed okay to the Choctaw word "okeh", which means "it is so". This theory was endorsed by President Woodrow Wilson. Unlike Read's own scholarship, this etymology lacks a clear historical record. Nonetheless, this theory remains popular.

You know this language that we speak,

is part German, Latin and part Greek

Celtic and Arabic all in a heap,

well amended by the people in the street.

Choctaw gave us the word "okay"…

— Peter, Paul, & Mary, All Mixed Up (1964). Written by Pete Seeger.

In this etymology, OK is a backronym chosen for its phonetic consonance.

A serious problem with this etymology is the lack of a strong reason why a word from a language of a group geographically then legally restricted to America's south coast then later the mid-west would be colloquially familiar to English-speaking residents of America's north-east extremity.

Another problem is the lack of a written record clearly linking the English usage with its prior usage.

Wolof: waw-kay

The underlying theme here is English-speaking Americans taking up a locally-heard African word.

Documented instances exist well before 1839 of African slaves in the Americas being quoted phonetically using words strikingly similar to the now common usage and meaning of okay. For example, in 1784:

"Kay, massa, you just leave me, me sit here, great fish jump up into da canoe, here he be, massa, fine fish, massa; me den very grad; den me sit very still, until another great fish jump into de canoe;..."

And a Jamaican planter's diary of 1816 records a "Negro" as saying:

"Oh ki, massa, doctor no need be fright, we no want to hurt him."

In particular, Wolof is a West African language which has had an unusually strong influence upon (once) colloquial English, with well documented examples such as banana, jive, dig (it), yam, and sock (someone), along with the contested hip or hip cat. Importantly, a key study claims Wolof to be an important lingua franca among American slaves.

"Waw" means "yes" and the suffix "-kay" or "-kai" adds emphasis. A simplistic word-for-word translation of Wolof's "wawkay" is "yes [emphatically]" or "yes, indeed"; but better usage translations would be "I agree", "I'll comply", "that's good", "that's right", or "all correct". The consonance of this last translation with the first documented usage of okay could be significant, or could be coincidence. However, okay's colloquial rather than formal usage strongly coincides with other Wolof words which have migrated documentedly into the American version of the English language, and its earliest documented usage is explicitly colloquial, not to say jocular. Significantly, the emergence of okay in white Americans' vocabulary dates from a period when many refugees from Southern slavery were arriving in the North of America, where the word was first documented.

In this etymology, OK is a backronym chosen for its phonetic consonance.

A strength of this etymology is its consonance with Read's own documented evidence of the craze for "comical misspellings". These typically took the form of phonetic transcriptions of locally heard accents. For example, the German-accented (Pennsylvanian Dutch-accented) "Vell, vot ov it?" Many refugees from Southern slavery were arriving in the North of America at the time of okay's first written appearance and it is likely that Boston residents would have come in contact with Africans using Wolof terms and could well have had wawkay translated for them as "all correct".

A serious problem with this etymology is the lack of a written record clearly linking the English usage with its prior usage.

Grammatical functions

In English okay may be used as nearly any part of speech. When used as a noun, the word signifies approval or consent, as in, "Make sure you get the teacher's okay on that topic." The verb has a similar function, such as, "Make sure you get the teacher to okay that topic." As an adjective or adverb it implies adequate but unremarkable quality: "That sandwich was okay." "We ran okay today." Okay as an interjection takes the place of "all right" or "that's enough": "Okay, I get the point." As part of an interrogative it looks like a Tag question but it actually requests confirmation: "We need to leave by five, okay?"

Spelling style

Whether this word is printed as OK, okay, or O.K. is a matter normally resolved in the style manual for the publication involved. Common style guides, such as Chicago, New York Times, etc., provide no consensus, nor do dictionaries.

Variations

• kay or 'kay, notably used in Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny" as a filler word by the maniacal Captain Queeg.
• k or kk — commonly used in instant messaging, or in S.M.S. messages.
• 'mkay, m'kay or mkay — in use long before, but popularised by, TV show South Park.
• Okey dokey, okey doke
• Okily dokily — Popularised as the catch phrase of The Simpsons character Ned Flanders.
• A-OK
• Okay has also been adopted in Korean colloquial speech (오케이), especially among the younger generations. For simplicity's sake, it is often spelled "ㅇㅋ" in text messages.

Usage

From the Oxford English Dictionary:

Okay (also OK) / adj, adv (informal) all right; satisfactory or satisfactorily

Eg. I hope the children are okay. (I hope the children are all right.)

I think I did OK in the exam. (I think I did well, but not too well, on the exam.)

He is okay. ( He is good )

Depending on context and inflection, okay can also imply mediocrity. For example: "The concert was just okay."

Okay is sometimes used merely to acknowledge a question without giving an affirmation. For example: "You're going to give back the baby that you stole, right?" "Okay."

Saying okay in a sarcastic tone or questioning tone can indicate that the person one is talking to is considered crazy and/or exacerbatingly stubborn in their view. "I really saw a UFO last night!" "Okay..."

Okay! can also be used as an exclamation in place of words like "enough!" or "stop!"

International usage

Okay has become an essentially global term, used today in most languages and most cultures around the world.

English speakers everywhere use and understand it.

In Europe the word is widespread and well-recognized.

In Brazil and Mexico, as well as in other Latin American countries, the word is pronounced just as it is in English and is used very frequently. Although pronouncing it the same, Spanish speakers often spell the word "okey" to conform with the pronunciation rules of the language. In Brazil, it may be also pronounced as "óka". In Portugal, it is used with its Portuguese pronunciation and sounds something like "ókâi".

Arabic speakers also use the word widely, particularly in areas of former British occupation like Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Iraq and Palestine but also all over the Arab world due to the prevalence of American cinema and television. It is pronounced just as it is in English (Arabic.أوكي) but is very rarely seen in Arabic newspapers and formal media.

In Israel, the word okay is highly common and almost replaced the Hebrew meaning of okay, which means "fine" (בסדר in Hebrew; literally, "in order") or "good" (טוב in Hebrew). It is written as it sounds in English אוקיי. At first it was considered as sort of spoken slang, but now it has reached the written world such as newspapers.

It is used in Japan and Korea in a somewhat restricted sense, fairly equivalent to "all right". Okay is often used in colloquial Japanese as a replacement for 大丈夫 (daijōbu "all right")　or いい (ii "good") and often followed by です (desu - the copula).

In China the term "好了" (hao le), whose meaning closely resembles that of okay, is commonly transformed into "OK了" (OK le) when communicating with foreigners or with fellow Cantonese speaking people in at least Hong Kong and possibly to an extent, other regions of China. The "了" indicates a change of state, ie. "OK了" indicates the achievement of consensus.

In Taiwan, it is frequently used in various sentences, popular among but not limited to younger generations. This includes the aforementioned "OK了" (OK le), "OK嗎" (OK ma), meaning "Is it okay?" or "OK啦" (OK la), a strong, persuading affirmative.

In the Philippines "okay lang" is a common expression, literally meaning "just okay" or "just fine".

In Malay, it is frequently used with the emphatic suffix "lah": OK-lah.

In Vietnamese, it says "Ô kê"

Computers

File:JavaScript Alert Dialog.PNG

A typical modal dialog box with prominent "OK" button

"OK" is used to label buttons in modal dialog boxes such as error messages or print dialogs, indicating that the user must press the button to accept the contents of the dialog box and continue. It is often placed next to a "Cancel" button which allows the user to dismiss the dialog box without accepting its contents. When a modal dialog box contains only one button, it is almost always labeled "OK" by convention and default. In this usage, it is always spelled "OK", not "O.K." or "Okay". The "OK" button can probably be traced to user interface research done for the Apple Lisa. Modern user interface guidelines prefer to avoid modal dialog boxes if possible, and use more specific verbs to label their action buttons instead of the generic "OK".

On the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (c.1984), there was an "OK prompt", which looked like this:

OK>

This meant that the Color Computer was ready to accept your command.

Many PCs from the 1990s performed a memory check during start-up. A counter showed the verified memory during the operation, sometimes suffixed with "OK".

During the boot sequence of Linux, after attempting to start each kernal process the result is shown as [ OK ] or [FAILED] as appropriate.

See also

• Okay gesture

References

• Beath, Paul R. (1946). 'O.K.' in radio sign language. American Speech, 21 (3), 235.
• Cassidy, Frederic G. (1981). OK — is it African?. American Speech, 58 (4), 269-273.
• Dalby, David. (1971, January 8). O.K., A.O.K. and O KE. New York Times, pp. L-31/4-6.
• Degges, Mary. (1975). The etymology of OK again. American Speech, 50 (3/4), 334-335.
• Eubanks, Ralph T. (1960). The basic derivation of 'O.K.' American Speech, 35 (3), 188-192.
• Greco, Frank A. (1975). The etymology of OK again. American Speech, 50 (3/4), 333-334.
• Heflin, Woodford A. (1941). 'O.K.,' but what do we know about it?. American Speech, 16 (2), 87-95.
• Heflin, Woodford A. (1962). 'O.K.' and its incorrect etymology. American Speech, 37 (4), 243-248.
• Levin, Harry; & Gray, Deborah. (1983). The Lecturer's OK. American Speech, 58 (3), 195-200.
• Matthews, Albert. (1941). A note on 'O.K.'. American Speech, 16 (4), 256-259.
• Mencken, H. L. (1936). The American language (4th ed., pp. 206-207). New York: Knopf.
• Mencken, H. L. (1942). 'O.K.,' 1840. American Speech, 17 (2), 126-127.
• Mencken, H. L. (1945). The American language: Supplement I (pp. 269-279). New York: Knopf.
• Mencken, H. L. (1949, October 1). The life and times of O.K. New Yorker, pp. 57-61.
• McMillan, James B. (1942). 'O.K.,' a comment. American Speech, 17 (2), 127.
• Pound, Louise. (1942). Some folk-locutions. American Speech, 17 (4), 247-250.
• Pound, Louise. (1951). Two queries: Usages of O.K. American Speech, 26 (3), 223.
• Pyles, Thomas. (1952). 'Choctaw' okeh again: A note. American Speech, 27 (2), 157-158.
• Read, Allen W. (1941, July 19). The evidence on O.K.. Saturday Review of Literaure, pp. 3-4, 10-11.
• Rife, J. M. (1966). The early spread of "O.K." to Greek schools. American Speech, 41 (3), 238.
• Wait, William B. (1941). Richardson's 'O.K.' of 1815. American Speech, 16 (2), 85-86, 136.
• Walser, Richard. (1965). A Boston "O.K." poem in 1840. American Speech, 40 (2), 120-126.
• Weber, Robert. (1942). A Greek O.K. American Speech, 17 (2), 127-128.
• Webster's Dictionary of English Usage, Merriam-Webster, 1989.

External links

• Where did OKAY come from?
• The Choctaw Expression Okeh and the Americanism Okay
• Ok. Let's continue.
• Most Frequently-spoken Word on the Planet: OK or O.K. or Okay
• A Straight Dope column on the origin
• Origin of the "OK Button"
• Origin of the Word OK
• NPR: The Origin of OK (audio)
• OK/OKAY- Exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery, Swiss Institute, New York University
• FAQ: "OK"