Ok

Part of speech: adjective, adverb, interjection, verb

Definitions

  1. Satisfactory or acceptable in quality or performance ; permission or approval for something to happen ; a word used to begin a statement or regain attention
  2. Adequate and meeting expected standards ; consent or authorization to proceed ; an interjection used to start a sentence or resume conversation
  3. Of sufficient quality or acceptability ; agreement or authorization ; an exclamation used to introduce a topic or return to speaking after an interruption

Etymology: It began as a joke about bad spelling. On March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post printed the initials "o.k." and glossed them "all correct", the punchline being that they stood for a deliberate misspelling, "oll korrect". Boston's newspapers in the late 1830s were in the grip of a craze for comic abbreviations of misspelled phrases: "O.W." for "oll wright", "K.Y." for "know yuse", "N.G." for "no go". Readers were meant to puzzle them out and laugh. Nearly all of them vanished within a few seasons. This one survived because of a presidential campaign. In 1840 Martin Van Buren ran for re-election, and his nickname, "Old Kinderhook", from his hometown in New York, happened to share the initials. Democrats founded O.K. Clubs and turned the letters into a slogan, while Whigs jeered that the phrase came from Andrew Jackson's notoriously shaky spelling. Van Buren lost, but the two letters escaped Boston and the campaign and spread across the country as a plain word of approval. Until the 1960s, many dictionaries favoured a different origin: the Choctaw "okeh", "it is so", familiar from Choctaw translations of the Bible. Woodrow Wilson is said to have written "okeh" on documents for that reason. The Choctaw word is genuinely older than the Boston joke, and its affirmative sense fits. But in the 1960s the scholar Allen Walker Read combed the newspapers of 1839 and 1840 and documented the abbreviation fad and the Van Buren campaign in detail, and most dictionaries now follow him. Other popular tales, such as Scots "och aye" and Greek "ola kala", have no early evidence behind them. The meaning has quietly slipped since then. What started as "all correct", an emphatic seal of approval, can now mean merely acceptable. A meal described as OK is one nobody is raving about.

Synonyms: fine, acceptable, satisfactory, alright, adequate

Antonyms: unacceptable, unsatisfactory, poor, bad