I actually prefer alright although I’ll use the longer form if a style guide demands it. Alright is, IME, always used as a synoym for OK, whereas “all right” looks as though everything’s right.
Like in the 2010 film The Kids Are All Right - it looks like it’s a play on words, as in the kids are just fine, thanks, but they’re also right about [something or other]. I haven’t actually seen the film, so don’t know if the play on words would make sense or not. If the only meaning they’d intended was “OK,” then “alright” would have made that clearer.
Well, that’s kind of the point; to some people, like me, looking up a style guide for this is like using a dictionary to find out whether it’s spelled “car” or “kawerr”. Thus my poll; I wanted to get a sense of how widespread a view it is that “alright” is a legit spelling to begin with.
I came in to say essentially this. “Alright” and “All right” confer two different meanings, and this is even the comparison I was going to use because I don’t think anyone would argue that “Already” and “All ready” should be used synonymously. In fact, at least two of my English teachers made this same distinction. It actually seems odd to me that so many people don’t see that distinction.
If I had a nickel for every time that song popped up on this forum…
I prefer “all right” to “alright,” though what bothers me more (and I’m sure you’re all tired of hearing me rant about it) is “everyday” used instead of “every day.” (And yes, I’m aware that “everyday” is also a word.)
Increasingly, I’m seeing “eachother” as one word too, which makes no sense to me at all.
My theory: It all started with “on to” and “onto”.
Since advertisers couldn’t get their heads around the difference between them and couldn’t care less anyway, the difference between “everyday” and “every day” was something only elementary-school graduates would care about. K-Mart certainly didn’t. It was among the first, if not the first, to tout its everyday ignorance from coast to coast.
It should be “all right” all the time, never “alright.” Possibly some of those voting “It depends” are confusing the term with “altogether,” which sometimes is “all together” and sometimes “altogether.”
I work with captions/subtitles. I have to reformat A LOT of older films and shows. Every time “alright” shows up, it is changed to “all right”. The former is incorrect, but it was used a lot years ago on SD TV to save on screen space and tech issues.
I think it’s okay for a comic strip to save space, but never anywhere else.
Actually, I think a distinction is emerging that is similar to other words that get combined. For instance, in the sentence “Alright, who was involved here?” “alright” doesn’t carry the meaning of the individual words, so I see no reason why they should be used. I also think “alright” is acceptable before a noun, since otherwise it would have to be hyphenated, which is weird for such a commonly used word.
Its not like “anyway” vs. “anyways,” where I just think the latter sounds better in most informal usages.
