Editing OK (section)

===West African===
An early attestation of the particle 'kay' is found in a 1784 transcription of a North Carolina slave, who, seeking to avoid being flogged, explained being found asleep in the canoe he had been ordered to  bring to a certain place to pick up a European exploring near his newly-purchased property :

{{blockquote|Kay, massa, you just leave me, me sit here, great fish jump up into da canoe, here he be, massa, fine fish, massa; me den very grad; den me sit very still, until another great fish jump into de canoe; but me fall asleep...{{sfn|Smyth|1784|pp=1:118–121}}}}

A West African (Mande and/or Bantu) etymology has been argued in scholarly sources, tracing the word back to {{Clarify|date=September 2023|reason=Which? Wolof and Bantu are utterly unrelated and spoken 2000 km apart.|text=the [[Wolof language|Wolof]] and [[Bantu languages|Bantu]]}} word ''waw-kay'' or the [[Mande languages|Mande]] (aka "Mandinke" or "Mandingo") phrase ''o ke''.{{citation needed|date=September 2023}}

David Dalby first made the claim that the particle ''OK'' could have African origins in the 1969 Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture. His argument was reprinted in various newspaper articles between 1969 and 1971.{{sfn|Cassidy|1981}} This suggestion has also been mentioned by Joseph Holloway, who argued in the 1993 book ''The African Heritage of American English'' (co-written with a retired missionary) that various West African languages have near-homophone discourse markers with meanings such as "yes indeed" or which serve as part of the [[Backchannel (linguistics)|back-channeling]] repertoire.<ref name="Yngve, Victor page 568"/>{{sfn|Holloway|Vass|1993}} Frederic Cassidy challenged Dalby's claims, asserting that there is no documentary evidence that any of these African-language words had any causal link with its use in the American press.{{sfn|Cassidy|1981}}

The West African hypothesis had not been accepted by 1981 by any etymologists,{{sfn|Cassidy|1981}}<ref name="onlineetym">{{cite web|url=http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=ok|title=Online Etymology Dictionary}}</ref><ref name="lighter">Lighter, Jonathon, (1994).  ''The Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang,'' 708.</ref> yet has since appeared in scholarly sources published by linguists and non-linguists alike.<ref name="linguistlist.org">[https://linguistlist.org/issues/4/4-705/ LINGUIST List 4.705]. 14 September 1993.</ref>