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. This article does not cite any references or sources. ... For other uses, see Slang (disambiguation). ...

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. The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ...

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: Sumner County is the name of several counties in the United States: Sumner County, Kansas Sumner County, Tennessee This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the same title. ... This article is about the U.S. state of Tennessee. ... Motto: (traditional) In God We Trust (official, 1956–present) Anthem: The Star-Spangled Banner Capital Washington, D.C. Largest city New York City Official language(s) None at the federal level; English de facto Government Federal Republic  - President George W. Bush (R)  - Vice President Dick Cheney (R) Independence - Declared - Recognized... This article is about the U.S. state of Tennessee. ... For other uses, see Andrew Jackson (disambiguation). ...

"proved a bill of sale from Hugh McGary to Gasper Mansker, for a Negro man, which was O.K."^[1]

However, the record is hand-written rather than typed, and James Parton's 1860 biography of Jackson^[2] suggested—and Woodford Heflin's (the Dictionary of American English staffer in charge of the OK entry) 1941 photographic analysis^[3] confirmed—that it is really a poorly written O.R., which was the abbreviation used for Order Recorded. Wikisource has original works written by or about: James Parton James Parton (February 9, 1822 – October 17, 1891) American biographer, was born in Canterbury, England He was taken to the United States when he was five years old, studied in New York City and White Plains, New York, and was...

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: Allen Walker Read (1906 - October 16, 2002) was an American etymologist, best known for his studies into the words okay and fuck. His first work, Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary, was privately published in Paris... The Boston Post was the most popular daily newspaper in New England for over a hundred years before it folded in 1956. ... A gloss is a note made in the margins or between the lines of a book, in which the meaning of the text in its original language is explained in another language. ...

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. The Providence Journal is a daily newspaper serving the metropolitan area of Providence, Rhode Island. ... A gloss is a note made in the margins or between the lines of a book, in which the meaning of the text in its original language is explained in another language. ...

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."^[4] In response, Whig opponents attributed OK, in the sense of "Oll Korrect", to Andrew Jackson's bad spelling. Presidential electoral votes by state. ... Martin Van Buren (December 5, 1782 – July 24, 1862), nicknamed Old Kinderhook, was the eighth President of the United States from 1837 to 1841. ... Kinderhook is a town in Columbia County, New York, USA. The population was 8,296 at the 2000 census. ... The Whig Party was a political party of the United States during the era of Jacksonian democracy. ... For other uses, see Andrew Jackson (disambiguation). ...

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. The Buxton Memorial Fountain, celebrating the emancipation of slaves in the British Empire in 1834, London. ...

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.^{[5][6][7][8][9][10]} 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. Allen Walker Read (1906 - October 16, 2002) was an American etymologist, best known for his studies into the words okay and fuck. His first work, Lexical Evidence from Folk Epigraphy in Western North America: A Glossarial Study of the Low Element in the English Vocabulary, was privately published in Paris...

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!".^[11] For other uses, see FAD (disambiguation). ...

"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."^[12]

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. For the fictional character of this name, see Stan Lee (Judge Dredd character). ...

Improbable or refuted etymologies

These range from the colloquial to the fanciful to the enthusiastic to the faintly humorous.^[13] 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.^[14] 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. ^[15]
• 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!"^[16]) would render this as as OK to an English-speaking listener.

Custer redirects here. ... Occitan, or langue doc is a Romance language characterized by its richness, variability, and by the intelligibility of its dialects. ... Latin was the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ... The langue doïl language family in linguistics comprises Romance languages originating in territories now occupied by northern France, part of Belgium and the Channel Islands. ... Presidential electoral votes by state. ... Martin Van Buren (December 5, 1782 – July 24, 1862), nicknamed Old Kinderhook, was the eighth President of the United States from 1837 to 1841. ... The Pennsylvania Dutch (perhaps more strictly Pennsylvania Deitsch or Pennsylvanian German) are the descendants of German immigrants who came to Pennsylvania prior to 1800. ...

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

For other uses, see Choctaw (disambiguation). ... Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania, and it is the native language of the ethnic group of the Wolof people. ... Map showing the approximate distribution of Bantu (light brown) vs. ... Mande refers to: the Mandé people of western Africa the Mande or Mandinka people of western Africa any of the Mande languages the Mande or Mandinka language This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists pages that might otherwise share the same title. ...

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 emphasises 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. The Pennsylvania Dutch (perhaps more strictly Pennsylvania Deitsch or Pennsylvanian German) are the descendants of German immigrants who came to Pennsylvania prior to 1800. ...

Choctaw: okeh

The underlying theme here is English-speaking Americans taking up a locally-heard Native American word. For other uses, see Native Americans (disambiguation). ...

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.^[17] For other uses, see Choctaw (disambiguation). ... Thomas Woodrow Wilson (December 28, 1856–February 3, 1924), was the twenty-eighth President of the United States. ...

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 backronym (or bacronym) is a phrase that is constructed after the fact from a previously existing abbreviation, the abbreviation being an initialism or an acronym. ...

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;..." ^[18]

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."^[19]

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.^[20] Importantly, a key study claims Wolof to be an important lingua franca among American slaves.^[21] Wolof is a language spoken in Senegal, the Gambia, and Mauritania, and it is the native language of the ethnic group of the Wolof people. ... Hip is a slang term, an adjective meaning fashionably current, referring to someone who is conversant with or deeply involved in a particular trend or subject. ... Hip is a slang term, an adjective meaning fashionably current, referring to someone who is conversant with or deeply involved in a particular trend or subject. ... Lingua franca, literally Frankish language in Italian, was originally a mixed language consisting largely of Italian plus a vocabulary drawn from Turkish, Persian, French, Greek and Arabic and used for communication throughout the Middle East. ...

"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 backronym (or bacronym) is a phrase that is constructed after the fact from a previously existing abbreviation, the abbreviation being an initialism or an acronym. ...

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". The Pennsylvania Dutch (perhaps more strictly Pennsylvania Deitsch or Pennsylvanian German) are the descendants of German immigrants who came to Pennsylvania prior to 1800. ...

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?" Tag questions (or: question tags) are a grammatical structure in which a declarative statement or an imperative is turned into a question by adding an interrogative fragment (the tag). The term tag question is generally preferred by American grammarians, while British ones prefer question tag. // In most languages, tag questions...

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. The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) is a highly regarded style guide for American English, dealing with questions of style, manuscript preparation, and, to a lesser degree, usage. ... The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage is a style guide (copyright 1999) by Allan M. Siegal and William G. Connolly. ...

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.

Herman Wouk (May 27, 1915 —) is a bestselling American author with a number of notable novels to his credit, including The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance. ... // Instant messaging (IM) is a form of real-time communication between two or more people based on typed text. ... SMS redirects here. ... This article is about the TV series. ... Simpsons redirects here. ... Nedward Ned Flanders is a fictional character on The Simpsons, voiced by Harry Shearer. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ...

Usage

From the Oxford English Dictionary: The Oxford English Dictionary print set The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) is a dictionary published by the Oxford University Press (OUP), and is the most successful dictionary of the English language, (not to be confused with the one-volume Oxford Dictionary of English, formerly New Oxford Dictionary of English, of...

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..." UFO can mean: Unidentified flying object United Future Organization, a Japanese-Brazilian electronic jazz band UFO, the rock band that previously featured Michael Schenker UFO, the Gerry Anderson TV series United Farmers of Ontario, a political party that formed the government in Ontario from 1919 to 1923 U.F.O...

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). For other uses, see Copula (disambiguation). ...

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.^[22] 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. Not to be confused with the Malayalam language, spoken in India. ...

In Vietnamese, it says "Ô kê"

Computers

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^[23]. 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".^[24] In computing, a button (sometimes known as a command button or push button) is a widget that provides the user a simple way to trigger an event, like searching for a query at a search engine, or to interact with dialog boxes, like confirming his actions. ... Example of dialog box from Microsoft Windows Dialog boxes are special windows which are used by computer programs or by the operating system to display information to the user, or to get a response if needed. ... Default in computer science refers to a default setting or value automatically assigned to a programme or device. ... The Apple Lisa was a revolutionary personal computer designed at Apple Computer during the early 1980s. ...

On the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (c.1984), there was an "OK prompt," which looked like this: 4k TRS-80 Color Computer from 1981, 26-3001 The Radio Shack TRS-80 color computer (also called Tandy Color Computer, or CoCo) was a home computer based around the Motorola 6809E processor and part of the TRS-80 line. ...

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."

See also

Look up okay in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• Okay gesture

Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... Wiktionary (a portmanteau of wiki and dictionary) is a multilingual, Web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in over 151 languages. ... Hand gestures, are gestures performed by one or two hands. ...

References

The Economist is an English-language weekly news and international affairs publication owned by The Economist Newspaper Ltd and edited in London. ... In the academic hierarchy in the United Kingdom and some universities in Australia and New Zealand, Reader is the rank between senior lecturer (or principal lecturer in the New Universities) and professor. ... In the academic hierarchy in the United Kingdom and some universities in Australia and New Zealand, Reader is the rank between senior lecturer (or principal lecturer in the New Universities) and professor. ... The Times is a national newspaper published daily in the United Kingdom (and the Kingdom of Great Britain before the United Kingdom existed) since 1788 when it was known as The Daily Universal Register. ...

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"