Is it OK, ok, Ok or okay?

Some people have asked what do I do when checking words to be included or excluded in the dictionary files I produce.

The following is an example of the work undertaken to check words for inclusion in the Australian English spellcheck dictionaries. Our first point of reference is the authoritative resources of the leading dictionaries used on Australia and then if the results of not conclusive we review usage using the body of documents available to us via the search engines.

In this case the answer is not a clear cut answer.

If we check the Macquarie dictionary we find "okay" is the first listed word and it should also be noted it is referred to as being colloquial. The Macquarie lists "ok" and "OK" as additional variations. The Australian Oxford English dictionary list "OK" and "okay" as an additional variation.

At this stage it does mean we can rule out the mixed case usage of "Ok" and that's a start.

At this point we now check the body of documents available to us via the Internet. This body of documents is not considered authoritative, but can often be used to assist us to confirm which authoritative reference more correctly most probably reflects current usage in Australia. The tool usage is a tool I created for the purpose and called the Kelvinometer. This is a convenient tool which summarises the number of pages from Australia returned by Google Australia and Yahoo Australia which contain the words or phrases.

With words like "ok" we find it is best to ask the Kelvinometer about the word and use it in context. The reason is on almost every dialogue on a computer you will see OK or Cancel. So we don't want to confuse technology usage with regular usage.

In this case we ask the Kelvinometer to return results for "is it ok" and "is it okay".

At this stage we have the result we need for the full version of the Australian English spellcheck dictionaries. That is "ok", "OK" and "okay" are all acceptable entries.

For many people that is all that is required. My aim however is to go one step further. The full version of the Australian English spellcheck dictionaries is known as a descriptive dictionary where it lists the words used in Australia. My aim is to find the predominantly used word and exclude secondary variations to create Australia's only prescriptive spellcheck dictionary. It is generally not considered incorrect to use the main spelling of a word, but many people consider secondary spellings to be incorrect. Thus the Kelvin version of the Australian English spellcheck dictionaries provides the best dictionary for those who wish to be right, most of the time. It also simplifies the language by removing the confusing multiple spellings and leads to more consistent spelling in documents.

The results are four to one in favour of the "ok" or "OK" usage. So now we have "ok" and "OK" as the two variations most used in Australia about 80% or more of the time.

So out of these two variations which is used more often? At this point we don't have a tool to produce an extract of documents from the search results, so we now do a manual sample check on the results returned by the search engines.

A check of the first 200 pages returned by Google gives us the following:

OK - 109
ok - 84
other - 7. This included O.K. and Ok.

Now I will admit that 200 pages may not be a statistically appropriate sample and a statistician could best suggest the required sample size. However based on this information it does confirm the Australian English Oxford dictionary entry which is "OK" as the predominant spelling variation.

The "OK" variation is now the spelling variation which will be included in the Kelvin version of the Australian English spellcheck dictionary.

I hope by working through this example this also helps others in their desire to fine tune their usage of Australian English.

- Kelvin Eldridge
Creator and maintainer of the Australian English spellcheck dictionary files now suspected to be used by over a million Australians. You can find more on the dictionary work at http://www.dictionary.justlocal.com.au/. You can also find links to the dictionary on the http://www.justlocal.com.au/ page.