OK in other languages: how often the world says it
OK is the same word in almost every language: ok or okay in Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese and German, and even OK in Latin letters in the middle of Mandarin. We counted it in the film and television subtitles of eight languages, and the result is startling: Italian subtitles say OK more often than English ones — 2,529 times per million words, against 2,482 in English. German is close behind at 2,209. And in four of the languages, OK is said more often than at least one of the native words for the same thing.
How often each language says OK
- borrowed
- English, where it is native
| Language | OK per million | Against English | Rank of ok | Rank of okay |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Italian | 2,529.5 | 1.02× | 62 | 281 |
| English | 2,482.0 | 1.00× | 215 | 82 |
| German | 2,209.4 | 0.89× | 150 | 118 |
| French | 839.9 | 0.34× | 161 | 810 |
| Portuguese (Brazil) | 645.8 | 0.26× | 199 | 1,839 |
| Portuguese (Portugal) | 419.7 | 0.17× | 272 | 3,244 |
| Spanish | 257.2 | 0.10× | 456 | 2,476 |
| Mandarin | 229.4 | 0.09× | 1,057 | 676 |
Every spelling is added up — ok, okay, okey, o.k. and the rarer variants. In Italian, ok on its own is number 62 among all the words in the subtitles, ahead of most everyday nouns and verbs.
The spelling varies by country. English subtitles write okay 3.7 times as often as ok, and German ones also prefer okay; Italian, French, Spanish and both kinds of Portuguese mostly write ok.
At the other end, Spanish says OK about a tenth as often as Italian — 257 per million — and Mandarin least of all, at 229, where it has to compete with 好 (hǎo, good, OK), one of the commonest words in the language.
Does OK beat the native word?
This is harder to measure than it sounds, and it is worth being exact about why. The subtitle counts are of single words, and most of the native equivalents are phrases or words with other jobs. Italian va bene can only be counted as va, which also covers come va ("how's it going") and va via ("go away"); French d'accord is split at the apostrophe, so its count includes every accord, "agreement". So each native count below is a ceiling: the real "OK" use is lower.
That makes half the answers certain. Where OK beats the ceiling, it beats the native word, full stop. Where the native ceiling is higher, the word counts cannot settle it, and the table says so.
| Language | Native word | Per million | OK per million | The count also includes | Said more |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spanish | vale | 662.5 at most | 257.2 | also “it is worth”, as in vale la pena | cannot tell from word counts |
| Spanish | de acuerdo | 867.8 at most | 257.2 | also “an agreement” | cannot tell from word counts |
| French | d'accord | 990.5 at most | 839.9 | also “an agreement”; the list splits d'accord at the apostrophe | cannot tell from word counts |
| Italian | va bene | 2,055.6 at most | 2,529.5 | every va: come va, va via, va bene | OK, certainly |
| Italian | d'accordo | 522.5 at most | 2,529.5 | also “an agreement”; the list splits d'accordo at the apostrophe | OK, certainly |
| Portuguese (Brazil) | beleza | 100.4 at most | 645.8 | also “beauty” | OK, certainly |
| Portuguese (Brazil) | combinado | 16.8 at most | 645.8 | also “combined” | OK, certainly |
| Portuguese (Portugal) | pronto | 375.0 at most | 419.7 | also “ready” | OK, certainly |
| German | alles klar | 728.0 at most | 2,209.4 | every klar: clear, of course, alles klar | OK, certainly |
| German | einverstanden | 49.2 at most | 2,209.4 | “agreed”, in any sentence | OK, certainly |
| Mandarin | 行 | 272.6 at most | 229.4 | also “to walk”, “a line of work”, “capable” | cannot tell from word counts |
| Mandarin | 可以 | 2,495.8 at most | 229.4 | also “can, may” | cannot tell from word counts |
The certain results:
- Italian: OK is said more often than every use of va put together, so it is certainly commoner than va bene — and than d'accordo. In Italian dialogue, the borrowed word has won.
- German: OK beats every klar, so it is commoner than alles klar, and it is said many times as often as einverstanden. (German's other "OK", a plain gut, cannot be separated from gut meaning "good".)
- Brazilian Portuguese: OK beats beleza and combinado, both common Brazilian ways of saying "OK, deal".
- European Portuguese: OK beats every pronto — the very Portuguese "right, OK, that's it" — even though pronto also means "ready".
The open ones: in Spanish, vale (said in Spain) and de acuerdo both have ceilings above OK, and the subtitles mix Spain with Latin America, where vale is not used this way, so nothing can be concluded. French d'accord is in the same position, its ceiling only slightly above OK. And in Mandarin, 行 and 可以 both mean much more than "OK".
One caution about subtitles
These are subtitles, and a large share of the films and series behind them were made in English and translated. A translator rendering an American "okay" may well write ok where an Italian or German speaker in the street would have said something else. So the honest claim is about dialogue as it is subtitled, which is the largest record of everyday speech there is for these languages, and which is also the dialogue these learners will meet on screen. It is not a recording of Rome or Berlin.
Esperanto is not in the chart because its subtitle corpus is too small to say anything: 403,882 words, in which ok and okej appear 42 times between them. The native bone, "well, good, OK", appears 1,409 times.
Where OK came from
OK is American, and its origin was settled by the lexicographer Allen Walker Read in a series of six articles in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964. The earliest use he found in print is in the Boston Morning Post of 23 March 1839, as "o.k. — all correct". It was a joke: Boston newspapers had been running a fad for comic abbreviations since the summer of 1838, often of deliberate misspellings, and "all correct" misspelt as "oll korrect" became O.K.
It would have died with the fad but for the 1840 presidential election. Supporters of Martin Van Buren, a native of Kinderhook, New York, nicknamed him "Old Kinderhook" and formed a Democratic O.K. Club; the letters went national, and stayed. The linguist Allan Metcalf tells the whole story in OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word, which its publisher introduces with the claim that OK is "the most frequently spoken (or typed) word on the planet" — a claim nobody can measure, but the counts above suggest why people believe it.
If you are learning one of these languages
OK will get you understood in every one of them, and in Italian and German it is as natural in speech as anything native. But the native words are worth having: vale in Spain, d'accord in France, pronto in Portugal, beleza in Brazil and alles klar in Germany are what make you sound like you learned the language rather than an app. Every course's word list ranks words like these by how often they are really said — Italian, German, Spanish and French among them — and the Italian vocabulary test tells you in two minutes how many of them you already know. Other everyday words compared across the same eight corpora are in love or money: what films say most, and the traffic in the other direction is in German words used in English.
Sources
- Lison, P. & Tiedemann, J. (2016). OpenSubtitles2016: Extracting Large Parallel Corpora from Movie and TV Subtitles. Proceedings of LREC 2016. aclanthology.org
- Dave, H. FrequencyWords: frequency lists from OpenSubtitles 2018, content licensed CC BY-SA 4.0. github.com
- Wikipedia: OK — Allen Walker Read's six articles in American Speech (1963–64), the Boston Morning Post of 23 March 1839, the 1838 abbreviation fad, and "Old Kinderhook" in 1840. en.wikipedia.org
- Wordorigins.org: OK, okay — "oll korrect", the 1838 fad, and the Democratic O.K. Club. wordorigins.org
- Metcalf, A. (2010). OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word. Oxford University Press. goodreads.com
- The spellings and native words counted, and the ceiling rule, are in
scripts/frequency_extras.py(OK_SPELLINGS,OK_RIVALS).