June 4, 1999

alright

The other day my wife was composing an email message and used the word "alright." The spell checker flagged it and she asked me why. I told her (because it was what I had learned in high school forty years ago) that it is wrong; that she should use "all right." Since then, I looked it up in a dictionary and discovered that "alright" is...all right. When did this happen? Was my teacher (gasp!) wrong? And what about my spell checker? Enlighten me, please.

The spelling of all right--or more appropriately the spelling of alright, since the former is never questioned--is one of the Great Usage Debates of recent times.

Forms like all right, in whatever spelling, were around in the Middle English period, and then died out for no obvious reason. They reappeared in the early eighteenth century; it is uncertain whether all right was a re-coinage, or whether we just have no written evidence for four hundred years.

In modern times, the form alright is first found in the 1890s. Presumably, it was created and/or popularized based on analogy with such words as already and altogether. These spellings, though, had been long established by that time, while alright, being newer, could be criticized. And criticized it was, from the early 1900s onwards.

Usage writers and copy editors (and schoolteachers) tend to really, really hate alright. Some of the comments one can collect from them are "horrendous," "ignorant," "illiterate," "over my dead body," "lazy," and the like. This hostility has not changed much in recent years, despite the ever-increasng frequency of the form.

It has always been true that the form alright has been more common in non-formal contexts. But it has also been used for the better part of the century by undoubtedly notable writers. Theodore Dreiser used it through the manuscript for The "Genius", though H.L. Mencken made him change it to all right. Other alright users include James Joyce in Ulysses, Flannery O'Connor, Mordecai Richler, Langston Hughes, and Gertrude Stein.

While in general, alright can be found in all the senses of all right, in practice there can be a real semantic distinction between the two, because the two word form all right can mean 'all correct' or something like that, while alright can only mean 'good; safe; healthy', etc. when used as an adjective. (Similar distinctions are found with already and all ready, though these forms have diverged to the point where they are not interchangable at all.) Thus the sentence "The Kids Aren't All Right" can mean 'not all the kids are right', or 'some of the kids are wrong', while "The Kids Aren't Alright" can only mean 'the kids are not OK'.

This sentence is not theoretical; it appeared as the cover line in New York magazine in 1995, which occasioned such an outburst of criticism that the magazine felt obliged to run an explanation several issues later. Their main points were that alright was a clear allusion to the song "The Kids Are Alright," by The Who, and the clarity issue mentioned above. Their explanation probably did little to satisfy the many outraged English teachers who called their offices.

The current status of alright is hard to assess. It is very common even in edited writing--some studies have suggested that it is more common, which seems unlikely. Many people and many periodicals use it regularly. Yet it is still loudly condemned (your spell checker, like most, is designed to reject anything that's even slightly problematic). Depending on your linguistic philosophy, it is either an outright error that is distressingly widespread, or a perfectly standard usage that is unnecessarily condemned.