OK

For other uses, see OK (disambiguation).

Okay is a term of approval or assent, often written as OK, O.K., ok, okay, okee, okey, okie, okey day or more informally as simply kay or k. Sometimes used with other words, as in "okey, dokey". When used to describe the quality of a thing, it denotes acceptability. However, its usage can also be strongly approving; as with most slang, its usage is determined by context. It could be one of the most widely used words on Earth, since it has spread from English to many other languages.

The historical record shows that O.K. appeared as an abbreviation for "oll korrect" (a conscious misspelling of "all correct") in Boston newspapers in 1839, and was reinterpreted as "Old Kinderhook" in the 1840 United States presidential election. Because it is a recent word born of word play, and because it is so widely used, O.K. has also invited many folk etymologies. These competing theories are not supported by the historical written record, except in that folk and joke etymologies influenced the true history of the word. Since the 19th century, the word has spread around the world, the okay spelling of it first appearing in British writing in the 1860s. Spelled out in full in the 20th century, 'okay' has come to be in everyday use among English speakers, and borrowed by non-English speakers. Occasionally a humorous form okey dokey (or okey doke) is used, as well as A-ok.

Etymology: "Oll Korrect" and "Old Kinderhook"

Allen Walker Read conclusively documented the early history of the abbreviation O.K., now also spelled 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 its spread to the rest of the world. He also documented controversy surrounding O.K. and the history of its folk etymologies, both of which are intertwined with the history of the word itself.

The first printed examples of O.K. can be found in the Boston newspapers of 1839 as part of a broader fad of forming and employing acronyms and initialisms, many of them barbarous. Other examples at the time included G.T.T. for "gone to Texas" and K.Y. for "know yuse". The general fad may have existed in spoken or informal written American English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers. O.K. was intended as a misspelling of "all correct"; in the first few years it was often published with this gloss. (Note that gloss indicates the spread of a new word.) The gloss was sometimes varied with degraded spelling 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. In this first phase, O.K. was spread with the acronym fad from Boston to other American cities.

The first recorded appearance in the first phase was in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, in the following passage (presumably written by editor Charles Gordon Greene):

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.

In a second phase, O.K. was boosted by the 1840 presidential election, and thus marked to outlast the acronym fad from which it came. Democratic supporters of candidate Martin Van Buren equated "Oll Korrect" with "Old Kinderhook", which was a nickname for Van Buren, a native of Kinderhook, NY. In response, Whig opponents attributed O.K., in the sense of "Oll Korrect", to Andrew Jackson's bad spelling. Thus, the election popularized both O.K. and a folk etymology that the acronym came from Andrew Jackson.

O.K. spread across the United States over the next two decades, and probably as far as Jamaica by 1848. The Civil War cemented its use, as much by confirming to American speakers that it was widely understood as by spreading it yet further. In the second half of the 19th century it spread to England and many other countries. In England it was first viewed as an improper Americanism, but it became widely accepted between the first and second World Wars.

Folk etymologies

The wordplay origin of O.K. invited folk etymology and joke etymology from the beginning. Eventually there appeared folk etymologies that were not connected with either word play or the 1840 Presidential election. In particular, in 1859, a Tennessee historian named Albigence Waldo Putnam misread an appearance of O.R. in a 1790 missive by Andrew Jackson as O.K.. This made Andrew Jackson the dominant theory of the origin of O.K. until it was disproven by Woodford Heflin in 1941 using photographic analysis.

According to Read, an English professor at the University of Alabama named W. S. Wyman attributed OK to the Choctaw word "okeh", which means "it is so", in 1885. 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 among some students of Indian culture.

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 the Civil War, but this is also anachronistic.

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 of the versions of this story include impossibly anachronistic choices for the company such as the Ford Motor Company, as well as implausible employee names such as "Omar Kulemsky". (In this example, Omar is Arabic, while Kulemsky is a possibly non-existent surname similar to several Eastern European surnames.)

International folk etymologies

There are also many proposed international etymologies of O.K., but they lack supporting written evidence just as the American folk etymologies do.

In Greek, O.K. is a correctly-spelled abbreviation for the expression, Ola Kala (Ὅλα Καλά, ΟΚ), which has the same meaning as the American English "okay". It is possible that Greek sailors used Ola Kala in American ports.

"Waw-kay" is an exclamation in both Bantu and Wolof dialects: "waw" means yes, and "kay" is an emphatic, so "waw-kay" is an emphatic yes. There is a record of a traveller from England who encountered such usage from a slave in Virginia in the 18th century:

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;...

Although this usage of "kay" significantly predates the initialism fad in Boston, there is no record that connects this particular Bantu word to the use O.K. among non-slave English speakers. However, some other English words such as jive (jev) and banana have uncontested Bantu or Wolof origins.

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 okay.

French fishermen, including those based in New Orleans, might sometimes have used the phrase "au quai", literally "to the quay", to mean that a fishing trip was successful (or went okay) and therefore there were fish to unload at the quay.

The term OK is also used by typesetters and people working in publishing. A manuscript that did not need any changes or corrections would be marked O.K. for Ohne Korrektur (German for 'without correction'). Other stories are that it comes from the British English word hoacky (the last load of the harvest), the Finnish word oikein ('that's right' or 'correct'), or the Scottish expression och aye (oh yes).

Yet another unsupported speculation is that the word derives from Spanish. English speakers may have directly translated the phrase 'or what' into Spanish, and the Spanish speakers have regarded it as an English dialectal feature. Or Spanish speakers may have used the phrase '¿o qué?' (or what?) in the end of many English sentences, letting English speakers interpret it as a dialectal 'right' and thus replied with an affirmative 'o qué'.

There may also be a tie in to Finnish immigrants to the US. The Finnish "oikea" tranlates to accurate, arrant, authentic, correct, due, exact, genuine, germain, just, positive, proper, pure, real, right (meaning also the direction), sound, true, veritable, regular, as in "Se on oikein" (It is correct or OK)

In Sesotho, the national language of Lesotho, the phrase "ho lokile," (pronounced "ho low-key-lay") means literally "that/this/it is good." This is an unlikely source for the English okay, but English-speaking students of Sesotho experience an eerie moment when introduced to this very common phrase. (Similarly, the phrase "e-a ntatae" means "yes, sir" - literally, "yes, father." It is pronounced very much like "A-on Daddy"!)

Grammatical functions

In English okay may be used as a verb, noun, adjective, adverb, and interjection.

Levin & Gray (1983) identify what they term a lecturer's OK that is used in academic settings by both teachers and students. This type of okay is preceded by a pause, accompanied by breaking eye-contact with the listening audience, and is uttered with a half voice (i.e. a voice lower in loudness, louder than a whisper but softer than a normal speaking voice).

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: Chicago, New York Times, etc., provide no consensus nor do dictionaries. The Associated Press Stylebook recommends the spellings "OK, OKd OKing, OKs" and states "do not use [the spelling] okay."

More recently, text messagers (email, chat rooms, instant messaging, mobile phone messaging (Short message service), etc.) use k or even kk, as a quickly-typed, informal variation of the spelling, though some claim this variation has been in use since at least the BBS days of the early 1990s.

It seems as though the terminology KK came about to be a common replacement in North American Internet Culture sometime after 2000. Believed to be started in hacked game servers where often people of different cultures were unable to communicate due to language restrictions, KK became a universal understanding of acceptance in arranging game options, when communication was impossible without the use of services like AltaVista's Babelfish. Soon thereafter, KK became widely accepted as a replacement for the singular consonant, K.

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 OK. ( 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 the money back 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.

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

International Usage

Okay is a very widespread term. English speakers everywhere use and understand it.

In Europe the word is widespread and well-recognized.

In Mexico the word is pronounced just as it is in English, and is used very frequently.

In Brazil, it is used with its original pronunciation and local translation of O (ó) and K (ká), which sounds something like "okah".

It is used in Japan, Korea and Taiwan in a somewhat restricted sense, fairly equivalent to "all right".

In China the term "好了" (hao le), whose meaning closely resembles that of OK, is commonly transformed into "OK了" (OK le) when communicating with foreigners. The "了" indicates a change of state, ie. "OK了" indicates the achievement of consensus.

See also

• Mhmm
• OK Computer
• OK Corral
• OK Go
• OK Soda
• OK 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

• The Choctaw Expression Okeh and the Americanism Okay
• The OK Democratic Club, circa 1840
• A Straight Dope column on the origin
• Origin of the "OK Button"
• Origin of the Word OK