Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Not to worry; it should be "all right." Alright ain't a word.
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That's not quite correct. I wrote about all right vs. alright in
On Words: Alright and All Right. As the
American Heritage Guide notes, “The sentence
The figures are all right means that the figures are all accurate, that is, perfectly correct, while
The figures are alright means that they are satisfactory.…”, thus it may depend on the intended meaning as to which is the correct spelling. My article does note other views, such as:
Quote:
Merriam Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage asks “Is alright all right?” and answers with a qualified yes: First, all right is more commonly used in print. Second, the authors of most handbooks for writers think alright is wrong. And third, alright is more likely to be found in trade journals, magazines, and newspapers than in more literary sources. (Is word snobbery at play here?)
The earliest use of alright in modern usage is by Chaucer in 1385. But once we leave Chaucer, there are no examples of either alright or all right until the late 17th-early 18th centuries when there are examples of all right but with all used as a pronoun, as, for example, in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719): “desir’d him to…keep all right in the Ship.”
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For more discussion, please see my article.