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The history of 'OK' (2023)
- CTDOCodebases 2y agoI always find it odd when people track down the invention of something to one source when multiple people were using the same phrase around the same time. Sure it's popularisation may have been fueled by a particular person or group but did they really invent it? Or did they refit an existing abbreviation to fit their purpose? Or was it just invented in parallel? One explanation I have heard about "OK" is that it was an abbreviation invented by Greek migrant dock workers in the USA. Apparently they used to write the abbreviation "OK" on boxes that contained what they were supposed to contain. "ola kala" is a Greek phrase that basically means "everything good".
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoOk
- poochkoishi728 2y agoIn this instance, this is such an elegant, concise and multilayered response. Simultaneously: - "Let's be done with this statement." - "What's the interesting point here?" - "We chose a civil approach here, going with indifference to these string of words" - "Look how great the word 'OK' is. Two letters to express all this."
- pbj1968 2y agoDid you know people had achieved manpowered flight before the Wright brothers? Can you name any of them? If you aren’t the wellspring of popularity then nobody cares.
- SamBam 2y agoBut do stories like the origin being "ola kala" have any actual primary-source evidence? If not, they're just old wives' tales. This version has actual evidence. It has the first recorded use. It situates it in the context of the fad at the time. It shows that in the first usage the author included the expanded version because other people wouldn't know it. It shows how it was replied to be someone who had read the article. I find it odd when someone replies to a piece of research with their own story that they believe simply because they heard it first.
- gumboshoes 2y agoThat's a story with no evidence, though. The written records simply cannot support it. All we have is supposition or people quoting it to each other saying it was Greek whoevers but no unselfconscious uses of it in that context.
- jcranmer 2y agoSlang words tend to produce loads of folk etymologies that have little basis in reality. Partially, this is because slang words tend to be less visible in records that survive to the modern time. And also partially, etymology tends to be a field where people feel inclined to make stuff up that sounds right and these stories get passed along because feeling right is valued more highly than actually being right. The proposed etymologies of OK fall into three main buckets: * OK is an initialism for a misspelled variant of 'all correct' * OK is a phonetic rendition of some phrase in $LANGUAGE (there are a few different such languages proposed) * OK is an initialism for some phrase in $LANGUAGE (again, different phrases in different languages have been proposed) Of these etymologies, the second bucket can be pretty thoroughly ruled out immediately: OK shows up in our sources first as an initialism, not 'okay', so it's not likely to be anything other than an initialism. As for deciding what it's an initialism of... well, "all correct" is actually the most reasonable on first guess because someone who is going to come up with a "just-so" story for a folk-etymology is likely to go for a phrase which actually initializes to OK rather than one which conspicuously doesn't, and thus someone advancing an "all correct" theory is likely to be able to point to evidence of its truth. Which we have.
- CTDOCodebases 2y agoI understand evidence is important. I guess the issue I have is how much certainty do we assign to whatever origin we attribute. I guess we can say that the explanation in the article is the best guess with the available evidence but what do we do if the evidence is limited? Take the example I gave. How many cardboard boxes were around when people decided to start hunting down the first instance of “OK”? What is the likely hood of someone photographing one of those boxes given the prevalence of photography at the time and the importance of a cardboard box?
- dang 2y agoRelated: How 'OK' took over the world (2011) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14533098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14533098 - June 2017 (99 comments) I think there have been other threads as well?
- f_allwein 2y agoNot much of a thread, but yes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17177657 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17177657
- dang 2y agoAh - the covention is to link to past threads with (interesting) comments, because otherwise users click on the link expecting to find some and become grumpy when they're not there.
- pfdietz 2y agoPerhaps the way to look at this was that "ok" came not from the events that created it, but from the niche it filled. There must have been a need for the term or it would not have thrived and spread.
- devilbunny 2y agoEnglish has all manner of ways around the fact that we abandoned plural "you" around 1600 or so. Y'all, yinz, you-all, you guys. I grew up in the South, so it's "y'all" for me, but there's nothing fundamentally wrong with "thou/thee" for singular and "you/ye" for plural second person. It just was victim to the euphemization treadmill until it fell out of common usage, so we had to reinvent it.
- hatboat 2y agoAs an Australian, "youse" is the most common variation here. It's sometimes maligned as a bit lower-class/bogan, but it certainly fills a niche!
- hahahacorn 2y agoA deep knowledge of etymology, if nothing else, is useful for answering a 5 year old's infamous chain of "why?"s Disregarding potential inaccuracies, I love stories like these. Not particularly sure why, but I'm sure someone has a post somewhere about why we're so obsessed with the history of _our_ mundane.
- dylan604 2y agoI would posit it is less from native speakers but from those learning the language. When you grow up hearing/learning/using a word, you just use it. I don't really remember learning words and being told their etymology, but do remember learning some when taking a foreign language class in school. Could be completely wrong though
- hencq 2y agoI love them too. In a similar vein I learned just the other day that the verb 'escalate' only became in vogue after the invention of the escalator in the 1920s. I can't really pinpoint why either, but I think it has something to do with the surprisingly dumb or meme-y roots of such common words.
- fireflash38 2y agohttps://www.etymonline.com/word/escalate#etymonline_v_32438 https://www.etymonline.com/word/escalate#etymonline_v_32438 If anyone is curious. Used to be escalade, but after the formation of escalade+elevator=escalator, we never really looked back.
- jonplackett 2y agoIs it me or does the final paragraph totally contradict itself? > It's not that it was needed to 'fill a gap' in any language. 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. That, as is then explained - response without judgement, is a really big and useful gap to fill.
- wizzwizz4 2y agoAffirmative.
- mc32 2y agoJust a couple too many syllables.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- eyelidlessness 2y agoAck
- inopinatus 2y agoRST
- quesera 2y agoIn certain IRC contexts, it was common to see "syn". This became "yt?" in the next generation, unfortunately.
- lll-o-lll 2y agoSure
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- causality0 2y agoI've found it's often impossible to get keyboards like Swiftkey to stop autocorrecting "ok" to "OK". It's so irritating because while grammatically correct, it makes me look like a boomer in text conversations.
- ClassyJacket 2y agoI've noticed this too but I just use the word 'okay' anyway. I mean, I'm not saying 'ock', I'm saying 'oh kay', so why shouldn't the spelling reflect that?
- gerdesj 2y agoOr are tending towards m'kay!
- doctor_eval 2y agoMy ghoti would like a word.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pushedx 2y agothe first thing I do on any device is disable all forms of autocorrect
- bigstrat2003 2y agoWhat? Nobody cares if you say "ok" or "OK", dude.
- DiggyJohnson 2y agoWhy the aggression?
- ClassyJacket 2y agoOK
- 2y ago
- nikolaj 2y agoShout out to anyone else on HN who grew up in Kinderhook NY!
- insane_dreamer 2y agoInteresting. I had heard that it came from the Greek όλα καλά (ola kala) which literally means "all good" (and makes more sense than it being a misspelling).
- SamBam 2y ago> and makes more sense than it being a misspelling Except for all the evidence in the article about how this was a trend.
- insane_dreamer 2y agocorrelation != causation
- divbzero 2y ago> “Beginning in the summer of 1838, there developed in Boston a remarkable vogue of using abbreviations. It might well be called a craze,” wrote the famed etymologist Allen Walker Read. Wait, you mean we weren’t the generation to make acronyms trendy? (AFAIK, WTF, LOL, JK, BRB…)
- from-nibly 2y agoNope, we are just the weaklings that chose to spell things korectly
- SamBam 2y agoI still remember "pwned" as a misspelling of "owned." Then of course there were all the other l33t spellings, but pwnd seemed to be the one most specifically about mistyping. Gen-Zers sometimes end statements with "Periodt." They also have lots of other phonetic ones, like "rizz," but that's more about the phonetics and less about the humor in misspelling.
- andoando 2y agoI never connected that pwned was a mispelling of owned, I always thought it was a word of its own.
- emmelaich 2y agoMore of a typo than a spello in the sense that P is next to O on the qwerty keyboard so gets hit occasionally, especially in the tense rush of online gaming. Similar to zomg, because z is next to the shift key and they were going for OMG.
- hunter2_ 2y agoAnd then there's this!1!!eleven Apparently due to intermittent shifting of 1 into an exclamation point, occasionally yielding multiple 1s, which can look like a random eleven, which is humorous to skip to directly.
- BryanLegend 2y agoOK
- SuperNinKenDo 2y agoI used to listen to the podcast for this site, but the problem is that any time they did a ppdcast on something I knew anything about, they would get things completely wrong. Not like, autistic special interest level stuff, but very, very basic stuff. If there was a popular misconception around, they would repeat it, even if the slightest bit of research would immediately dismantle it. After that happened about 3 times I realised that their material was useless for things I knew anything about, and less than useless for anything I knew nothing about.
- spacechild1 2y agoSee https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_a...
- elvircrn 2y agoDuring my elementary school days, we were told by our English teacher that the origin was related to death toll reporting after a battle (presumably involving the Brits or Americans). Therefore, "0 K" would indicate that no soldiers were killed - an OK outcome. This went on to live in my head rent-free until today.
- TacticalCoder 2y agoYup, heard the same. That "O K" was actually "0 K": Zero Killed. But zero killed and all good are both OK with me!
- userbinator 2y agoIt's interesting to note that its opposite, "NG" ("no good"), never seemed to have much popularity, but I've seen it show up increasingly often within the past few years.
- LeoPanthera 2y agoI see it far more in Japan than I do in the US or UK.
- hunter2_ 2y agoNG was (is?) popular Army slang, and American soldiers brought it to Okinawa. From there it spread throughout Japan, leading to its inclusion (stylized the same as OK) in emoji sets, which are historically Japanese. https://emojipedia.org/ng-button https://emojipedia.org/ng-button
- quesera 2y agoI'm glad to hear NG is increasing in use! I've used it for decades in all sorts of contexts. I've converted a few people! My life has included a lot of equipment, hardware, software, things that needed labeling, I reflect. Also I am not good about throwing broken things away, thinking maybe I'll want to salvage parts from it later. So a sticker (in recent decades, blue painters tape) with "19981105 NG" becomes a very useful thing, eventually.
- sublinear 2y agoLast time I saw NG anywhere was on a fax machine!
- tempodox 2y agoThat's probably because it should have been “K.G.” (as if spelled “know good”).
- emmelaich 2y agoMy favourite theory is that it comes from 'hoc' in Latin. One of the many words for yes. That meant there are similar words for yes in other languages. See also Langue d'Oc / languedoc.
- QuantumG 2y agoRelated: Alright is one word. So very often it's written "all right" by folks writing the subtitles.
- hallway_monitor 2y agoA common mistake I see: Every day is two words, everyday is strictly an adjective e.g. an everyday occurrence.
- hunter2_ 2y agoThe vast majority of reputable sources that appear via search engine say that alright is the informal version and all right is the formal version. Let's say that the latter is indeed an overcorrection and alright is the correct version; is the first syllable not actually referring to the notion of everything i.e. all -- it's some other prefix?
- SoftTalker 2y agoa'ight.
- hanche 2y agopretty sure I’ve seen it spelled awright. Unless that has a different meaning: Aww—right.
- hunter2_ 2y agoTaking the mystery of OK one step further: Spelling out single letters phonetically is fairly common (tee fitting, wye adaptor, em dash, queue/cue, and the entire Greek alphabet) but it's very rare for multi-letter initialisms. The only others I can think of are deejay (disk jockey) and emcee (master of ceremonies). But okay, defying all odds as usual, got there!
- Kye 2y agocee bee ay tea em eye pea zee (or zed) pea em if you're into Stargate
- hunter2_ 2y agoThe words (space-delimited) that you cited are each representing single letters, which I mentioned are popular. It's the compound words (deejay, emcee, okay) representing multiple letters that are rare.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- FiatLuxDave 2y agoAnother example, going back to WWII, is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seabee
- tempodox 2y agoCultural history never gets old for me. > …but not in everyday speech as it was "slangy." That hurdle has completely vanished, as by now we speak nothing but slang any more.
- hanche 2y agoOkay, so that raises the next question: What about “A-OK”? Apparently much used by astronauts in the early space flight era. Does it have older roots? It seems to have fallen completely out of fashion.
- ErigmolCt 2y agoI try not to use 'OK.' For some reason, my grandmother always encouraged me not to do so. I feel her disapproving gaze every time I say 'OK'