Just wondering what you guys think of this? I know, from a literary standpoint, that “okay” seems to be acceptable on some level. I’ve always felt that OK is a bit jarring to read, considering what it actually means. It doesn’t mean OUTSTANDING, which would actually make a little sense in all caps. I realize that the etymology of this could mean that it actually evolved from the initials O.K. for Oll Korrekt, or Old Kinderhook, or whatever. I’ve read many explanations. But I write it as “okay,” but I’ve noticed that my Firefox spellcheck underlines it…
I use ‘okay’ rather than ‘OK’. I seem to remember learning it as the word ‘okay’ first, and then being surprised when I encountered the abbreviation form.
I notice that Microsoft tends to use the ‘OK’ form on buttons. I can’t help thinking of them as ‘ock’ buttons.
Related question… ‘okay’ has made it into Esperanto as ‘okej’ (pronounced the same). I have heard it in the speech of people speaking many languages. Is it spelled as ‘OK’ or as a word in these other languages?
Main Entry: 1OK
Variant(s): or okay /O-'kA, in assenting or agreeing also 'O-"kA/
Function: adverb or adjective
Etymology: abbreviation of oll korrect, facetious alteration of all correct
: ALL RIGHT
After reading your enquiry, I decided to see how this worked in other languages. I’ve googled it in the languages that I know, and lo and behold, “ok,” always won out.
here’s what I googled
“estas ok/ay” Spanish
Here I’m not sure, as I don’t speak Latin American Spanish. In Castillian Spanish it doesn’t really exist except as a joke
“Das ist ok/ay” German. I tried to find a construction in each language that would use the construction the most, hence the difference between the spanish version. The absolute numbers aren’t important to me, only the diffferences between the ok/okay versions. OK won here too…If you were to translate that into spanish, you’d probably use bien instead of ok. Actually in Spanish, okay isn’t really used in a sentence so much as it is as a standalone word, but I had to put it in a sentence to isolate the other languages
And finally…Danish…yes, the most Americanized of all languages I know.
“Det er ok/ay” meaning that is okay. Again, “ok” wins over “okay”
Interesting. But were you always looking for the specific spelling ‘okay’ in those other languages? Wouldn’t they spell it phonetically according to their rules? What about languages that do not use the latin alphabet?
Back in my days as a cashier, we had an incident where a credit card swipe machine’s “OK” button had fallen off, and someone had taped a handwritten piece of paper over it that read “okey”.
“Why does the machine say ‘okey’?” A young woman asked as she was paying for her purchases.
“I don’t know. Maybe whoever wrote it was thinking of ‘okey dokey’?” I say.
I use both. I probably write OK a bit more than okay, but I use okay exclusively in any context where I might be talking about information storage so as to avoid OK being confused with zero kilobytes.
That’s how I feel. The acronym takes away from the aesthetic pleasure of the language, and is distracting as you read through it. Which is one thing if you’re writing a technical document, but another altogether if you’re writing something that should have some flow to it, some inherent beauty of construct.
I seem to be in the minority, but I’ve always written OK. This has never struck me as being unusual in the least. “Okay” seems very informal to me, and I’ve never typed the lowercase “ok” because it just feels like IM speak to me.
