Okay

How to spell okay

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce okay

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does okay mean?

1. adjectiveAcceptable, satisfactory, or in a reasonable state.
2. interjectionAn expression used to signal agreement, acceptance, or understanding.
3. verbTo approve or authorise something formally.
4. nounFormal approval or permission to proceed.

Okay in a sentence

• adjective

  The food was okay but nothing special.

• interjection

  Okay, let us move on to the next item on the agenda.

• verb

  The manager has to okay every refund over fifty pounds.

• noun

  We cannot ship the order without the client's okay.

• adjective

  After a short rest she felt okay again.

• interjection

  Okay, the meeting is now finished for today.

Where does okay come from?

Language of origin: Other

Okay is one of the great American success stories of the English language. The dominant scholarly explanation traces it to Boston in the late 1830s, when newspapers ran a craze for jokey abbreviations of deliberately misspelled phrases; O.K. stood for 'oll korrect', a playful respelling of 'all correct'. The letters were popularised soon after by the 1840 United States presidential campaign of Martin Van Buren, who was nicknamed 'Old Kinderhook' after his New York birthplace, and his supporters formed 'O.K. Clubs'. From the initialism O.K. the language gradually developed the fully written-out spelling 'okay', which let the word behave like an ordinary adjective, adverb, verb, and noun. The story that it came from a Choctaw word or from a dockworker's tally has often been repeated, but the 'oll korrect' origin is the one best supported by the documentary record.

How the word is built

• okay (a full spelling of the initialism O.K.; treated as a single unanalysable word with no prefix or suffix)