Is Ok a Real Word

However, the phrase was soon adopted ... other theories have been introduced, including the ideas that it came from a Choctaw Indian word meaning "it is so" or a Middle English word for the last load of a harvest....

Skip to main content · Carol Rapley, Twickenham, England This is generally assumed to be an acronym for 'orl korrect'. Like SNAFU ('Situation normal - all f***ed up'), it's believed to be a bantering term of military origin, signifying that things are supposedly all in order when they clearly ...

The term first appeared in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, although "it had probably been used colloquially before that," according to Doug Harper, who created the Online Etymology Dictionary.

Before 1839, English speakers had "yes", "good", "fine", "excellent", "satisfactory", and "all right". What OK provided that the others did not was neutrality, a way to affirm or to express agreement without having to offer an opinion. Consider this dialogue: "Let's meet again this afternoon." ... OK allows us to view a situation in simplest terms, just OK or not.

"They're not okay with your origin story?" Rocca said. "That's right. But it's okay if they wanna do it." The earliest appearance in a dictionary that we could find was in an 1864 edition of the Slang Dictionary of Vulgar Words. But today, does OK hold its own against that other common utterance -- "like"? In the battle of "like" versus "OK," Metcalf said, "OK comes out way out on top -- and underneath, too.

When Andrew Jackson popularized a word that his Choctaw neighbors always used in their councils to signify agreement, the aristocrats he threw out of office, always grasping at a chance to ridicule backwoods illiteracy, accused him of abbreviating and misspelling "All Correct".

correct, permissible, or acceptable; meeting standards. ... She's been OK since the operation. adequate but unexceptional or unremarkable; tolerable. The job they did was OK, nothing more. ... She'll manage OK on her own. He sings OK, but he can't tap dance. ... OK, I'll get it for you.

Read’s etymological research, painstakingly conducted in the days before digital newspaper archives, showed “how, stage by stage, OK was spread throughout North America and the world to the moon,” where Buzz Aldrin spoke it far from the humble newsroom where it began, writes the Economist. In the years that followed, some scholars contested Read’s conclusions. Writing in a 1975 issue of American Speech, Frank Greco of Rockefeller University suggested that the word might indeed have multiple origins—including the Scottish expression “och aye,” meaning “oh, yes”—that converged over time.

Although many have since been debunked, there are several theories worth revisiting if only to better understand the myth and curiosity surrounding these two simple characters. Choctaw OK: Peter Paul and Mary sing in “All Mixed Up” that “the Choctaw gave us the word ‘okay’”, a belief that stems from the Choctaw word “okeh” meaning “it is true” or “it is so”.