Of all the words in the English language, the word ‘OK’ is pretty new: It’s only been used for about 180 years.
When I was at school ‘OK’ would not have been accepted as an ‘ok’ answer to a question, it would have been seen as lazy or rude, but apparently ‘OK’ is now the most spoken word on the planet.
Language is evolving all around us. Words that our parents may have used when they were young are now deemed at best ‘old-fashioned’ at worst ‘derogatory’.
Syntacticians study words, Linguists study languages
For example, the word ‘silly’ used to mean ‘happy’ and now means ‘foolish’. Sometimes new words develop, like ‘stan’, which means a person who’s obsessed with a celebrity, and ‘exmoon’, a moon outside our solar system.
New words or meanings are usually in response to social changes or scientific discoveries. The largest dictionary of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary, is always adding new words. In fact, it added 1,400 new words in June 2019 and will add even more words in two years time.
So why did people start to say ‘OK’?
Experts think ‘OK’ likely emerged as an abbreviation of ‘oll korrect’ – which was a jokey way of saying ‘all correct’.
But wherever ‘OK’ came from it’s versatile, it can be used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, a conjunction or an interjection.
So, go fill your boots with the word ‘OK’, ‘O.K’ or ‘Okay’ — yes, you can use these in Scrabble.
