A San Antonio, Texas, middle-schooler has observed that when she and her friends are texting, they use different spellings to indicate agreement. Her friend types OK, but the caller prefers okay. Either is correct. For an engaging, thorough history of the word, however you spell it, check out Allan Metcalf’s OK: The Improbable Story of America’s Greatest Word. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “OK vs. okay”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Eleanor, and I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.
Welcome, Eleanor.
How can we help you?
So, I was wondering if there is a difference between OK, spelled O-K-A-Y, and O.K.
Oh, good question.
What a good question. What got you to wondering about that?
Well, some of my friends, whenever they text me, they say O.K. period, but whenever I text them back, I will say O-K-A-Y instead.
Does one feel more right to you personally? It sounds like O-K-A-Y, the longer form, feels better.
The longer one feels much better to me.
Why is that? Does it feel more like a real word?
I guess O period K period feels like an abbreviation for something, while O-K-A-Y feels like a real word.
It’s weird, but I think all of these things are true, even though they sound a little contradictory.
Let’s break this down.
First, if you’re a journalist or a writer, you’re probably going to use a style guide, and your style guide may have advice on which one they prefer.
For example, the Associated Press prefers OK, spelled out capital O, capital K, with no periods.
Oh, that’s interesting.
I think the New York Times style guide may also prefer that, and that’s because in their reasoning, it’s closer to the original form of, okay, that’s how it entered the language as an abbreviation for an intentional misspelling of all correct spelled O-L-L-K-O-R-R-E-C-T.
Wow.
Right?
Yeah.
Wow.
Yeah, there was this whole trend in the 1830s in Boston where the newspapers were just like intentional. You misspell words and come up with these like ridiculous abbreviations.
And that’s the only one that made it all the way to present day is okay.
That is really, really interesting.
Yeah, yeah, right?
Yeah, isn’t that wild?
It started out as a joke.
Yeah, but you’ll find again and again, every single dictionary that I checked, and I checked like 12 of these, and all editors that I know will permit OKAY as long as the style guide that they use doesn’t say that capital O, capital K is better.
Because O-K-A-Y has since joined the language fully as its own full word and doesn’t need to be the letters O and K anymore.
Eleanor, I have the same feeling about it, that it just feels more like a word if you spell it out with K-A-Y.
Yes.
There is a really great and very readable book.
How old are you, Eleanor?
I’m 11.
I think you could totally read this and have fun with it by Alan Metcalf. That’s M-E-T-C-A-L-F.
I just look, it’s the story of OK, I believe it’s called.
Just look for Alan Metcalf OK.
You can find it on Amazon or any online bookstore.
And it’s a really wonderful exploration of how this word entered not only our language, but dozens of languages around the world also use our OK to mean yes or an affirmation.
OK, I will look for that.
How are you spelling that?
OK, of course, it’s Eleanor.
Well, thank you so much for your call.
We really appreciate it.
Thank you for taking my call.
Okay.
Take care now.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Bye.
So that book by Alan Metcalf is OK.
The subtitle is The Story of America’s Greatest Word.
I highly recommend this.
It’s a great book.
And he goes into this whole newspaper trend and talks about what was happening in Boston.
And he also talks about kind of a supplementary thing that made OK stick.
And that was Martin Van Buren being called Old Kinderhook.
Old Kinderhook from Kinderhook, New York.
There we go.
877-929-9673.
