Is this word alright?

About the time of my last romantic catastrophe, a friend asked me how I was feeling. "I'm alright," I shrugged. I certainly wasn't all right. I was just alright: not bad, could be better but surviving.

Leslie Nielsen's on my side

Corresponding with a lot of American editors and language enthusiasts, I'm surprised to find just how appalled they are that anyone would be ignorant enough to use 'alright' as if it's a real word. I've wanted to write about it for a couple of months now, but first I wanted to find out why so many people object to it. Having failed to find a reason beyond a screech of horror, I tweeted the following on Friday:

Altogether, always, although: all fine. So why get uptight about 'alright'?

The response was disappointing. A few tweeters echoed my sentiment…

Good call. I much prefer it to all right... I know it's wrong but it feels so alright. (CJ Wheeler, @Wintriguing)

No good reason. It's a stubborn shibboleth. (@StanCarey)

Give it ten years. Publishers only just coming round to split infinitives. (Eleanor Crawford, @el_crawford)

…but no one wanted a fight. However, the admirable Mark Allen (@EditorMark) sent me a link to his recent blog on that very subject, commenting, "It's one of the top search terms leading people to my blog." Mark has also done us the service of citing all the main dictionaries, so I don't have to. Their conclusions ranged from the hostile to the placidly accepting, but they all stopped short of saying it was correct.

Believe it or not, I'm quite prepared to change my opinion if someone comes up with a persuasive argument, or sometimes I'll change if it seems like I'm in a minority of one among language professionals (the latter explains why I've recently started writing 'no one' without a hyphen).

But I can't see any problem with 'alright'. As with the similarly formed 'altogether', 'always', 'already', etc, the linking of two words creates a new word with a different meaning (see also 'without' and 'anyway', but not 'anytime' or 'anymore', which serve no purpose and are simply wrong). The fact that 'alright' took a longer time to enter the language is immaterial. 'Proactive' didn't join 'active', 'inactive' and 'reactive' until very recently, but it's been embraced like a long-lost child and quite rightly so. 

'Alright' means OK or acceptable, and the construction harks back to the Middle English use of 'al' and 'ful' as modifiers of adjectives. 'All right', on the other hand, means what it says: everything right ("I answered ten questions and got them all right"). Since the two are synophones, it's advisable to split 'all' and 'right' in spoken English to avoid confusion (as in, "I got all of them right") or stress the 'all', which is what we do with other constructions. It doesn't usually cause a problem, unless you're Leslie Nielsen.

'Alright' is so readily accepted in Britain that it even has a phonetic equivalent: "Orright"; which is a Londoner's way of asking, "How are you?" In Manchester, it's "Arright?" and as you get closer to Scotland it's more like "Arreet?"

The reasons to allow 'alright' aren't compelling, but the only argument against it seems to be that it's non-standard, which is no argument at all.

Moral: 'Alright' is alright. If you want a battle, take arms against 'anymore'.