ok
UK /ˌəʊˈkeɪ/ · US /ˌoʊˈkeɪ/ noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection, proper noun
Also a form of okay
Forms OKs OK's OKing OK'ing OKed OK'd OK'ed OKer OKest O.K. okay O. K. okeh okey
- noun Endorsement; approval; acceptance; acquiescence. “We can start as soon as we get the OK.”
- verb (transitive) To approve; to accept; to acquiesce to. “I don't want to OK this amount of money.”
- verb (transitive, computing) To confirm by activating a button marked OK.
- adjective All right, acceptable, permitted. “Is it OK if I spend the night?”
- adjective Satisfactory, reasonably good; not exceptional. “The soup was OK, but the dessert was excellent.”
- adjective Satisfied (with); willing to accept a state of affairs.
- adjective In good health or a good emotional state. “He's not feeling well now, but he should be OK after some rest.”
- adverb Satisfactorily, sufficiently well. “The team did OK in the playoffs.”
- interjection Used to indicate acknowledgement or acceptance. “I promise to give it back. – OK.”
- interjection (computing) Used to dismiss a dialog box or confirm a prompt.
- interjection Used to introduce a sentence in order to draw attention to the importance of what is being said. “OK, I'm thinking of a number…”
- interjection Used in turn-taking, serving as a request to the speaker to grant the turn to the interrupter. “You always do this to me! When we were at your mother’s, you said that… – OK, OK, …”
- interjection Used to sarcastically or sardonically indicate agreement with the previous statement.
- noun (Hong Kong) Karaoke.
- proper noun A language family spoken in Papua New Guinea.
Synonyms
approval endorsement green light go-ahead nod thumbs up approve greenlight allowed all right permissible jake adequate not bad satisfactory fine well adequately satisfactorily okey-dokey Oklahoma Sooner State O.K. okay okey okeh hunky-dory very well alright
Antonyms
NG forbidden bad inadequate poor unsatisfactory ill poorly sick under the weather unwell badly
Etymology
Origin disputed. Wikipedia lists many possible etymologies, of which the most widely accepted is that it is an abbreviation of oll/orl korrect, a comical spelling of all correct, which first appeared in print in The Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, as part of a fad for similar fanciful abbreviations in the United States during the late 1830s. The expression became popular through its use in the presidential campaign of Martin Van Buren in 1840, who was nicknamed Old Kinderhook, and then slowly acquired other meanings.
The Choctaw word oke, okeh (“it is so”), common in Choctaw translations of the Bible, could also explain OK's variety of affirmative definitions. Additionally, okeh was the most common etymology of okay in dictionaries until the 1960s, and linguistically predates Boston's O.K.. However, this theory suffers from the fact that the Choctaw language was relatively obscure and generally spoken (sometimes in a pidgin form) mainly with African-American slaves.
Possibly a shortening of Chinese 卡拉OK.
Sources: Wiktionary · WordNet 3.0 — from the Wiktionary entry “ok”, CC BY-SA 4.0. Details