OK, ok, O.K., okay, Ok! Which is it?

And what does it even mean?! A brief celebration of the most common word no one knows how to spell.

Fun fact for people who still “talk on the phone”: We tend to say “OK” as a signal that the conversation is still ongoing, and “Alright” when we’re ready to stop. Once you’re aware of it, it’s impossible not to notice, so I guess … sorry or you’re welcome. Alan Metcalf, who has written a comprehensive history of “OK,” notes that one of its distinguishing features is that it “affirms without evaluating,” which is to say that by itself, it’s completely neutral — you have to add a qualifier to it (“OK, great!” or “OK, I guess”) to indicate precisely what sort of OK we’re dealing with. And when it’s used as an adjective, it’s one of those rare modifiers that doesn’t pass the “very” test: You can’t say that something is “very OK” or even “moderately OK” any more than you can say that one thing is “OKer” than another thing. 

Despite refusing to play well with intensifying adverbs, “OK” is shockingly versatile — it also moonlights as an adjective, as in “an OK idea;” an adverb, as in “I’m doing OK;” and a noun, as in “give your OK,” not to mention the marvelous “lecturer’s OK,” which is when you look off into the middle distance, mutter “OK” to yourself, and begin to address the room on a new topic. And it’s so ubiquitous as an interjection that it has mutated into various forms that add different shades of meaning to the neutral assent that made it indispensable to early users of the telegraph in the late 19th century and took it from an absurdist joke to one of the most used words in any language ever. To most people, the typed “kk” is a way of softening “OK” to indicate a sort of chipper “can do!” as opposed to the glum assent that an unpunctuated “ok” seems to indicate in a text-based conversation. And depending on how old you are, you may be more or less inclined to agree with me that a solitary “k” means something rather closer to “fuck off and die” than “alright” or “that’s great.” 

Via Reductress

I’ve seen some corroboration for the claim that “kk” started life in the ’90s as a further abbreviation for “k, kewl,” which is fun to think about just because of how unbelievably ’90s that is, but, while this may well be a valid origin, it almost certainly also appeared organically via reduplication — a common process in language that can (among other things) add emphasis to an idea. We can also see reduplication at work in “Okie dokie,” or the Flanders variation “Okily Dokily,” both of which convey (to my mind) roughly the same sentiment as “kk,” except dorkier. 

As I’ve written elsewhere, “OK” started out life as “o. k.” (a lowercase abbreviation with a space!), and other forms have come and gone over the years, including “oke” (pronounced to rhyme with “oak”), which was the 1920s’ solution for sanding down OK’s rougher edges, as this 1929 article on slang in The Philadelphia Inquirer (cited by Metcalf in his book) makes clear: 

As in non-collegiate circles, the ponderous O. K. has given way to the snappier “oke.” There is a sonorous note about this expression, the compiler says, which has made its vogue immense. Among elite slangsters, in fact, it has almost completely ousted older expressions. 

“Okeh” was the preferred OK of Woodrow Wilson, among others (probably because of an apocryphal etymology that the word owes its origins to the Choctaw okeh, meaning “it is”), and over at Literary Hub, Johnny Diamond makes a strong case for the simple “ok” on the grounds that it’s the easiest and least ugly of the available options. The phonetic “okay” still holds sway in some circles, particularly when it’s being used as a verb, as it can accommodate all the whistles and bells that go along with being a verb (okaying, okays, okayed) more easily than in other forms, and there’s some evidence that it’s winning a war of attrition against some of its ancestors.

The OK that’s preferred by the AP Stylebook (“Do not use okay”), and which I’ve been using canonically here, is an initialism, like USA, FAQ, FUBAR, or (for my third wave emo friends) MCR, who, confusingly, spell “OK” as “Okay” and — in particularly intense moments — pronounce it as “Whoa-kay,” which adds an entirely new dimension of emotionality to the word. 

OK, so where does that leave us in terms of which OK to OK? Well, I obviously think that “OK” is the okayest, but I’d be OK with okaying “Okay” or even “ok,” as long as we’re all agreed that “k” is (in the immortal words of Gerard Way) NOT WHOA-KAY.