Oil. In the Brooklyn dialect, the word for the black sticky stuff is pronounced “earl,” while the noble earl is pronounced “oil”—a perfect transposition of sound.
By the way, the origin of oil has nothing to do with fossil fuels. The word started out as élaion 
in Greek and meant “olive.” Popeye’s girlfriend applauds this explanation.
(See HOAGIE, Y’ALL.)
OK. What may be the most useful expression of universal communication ever devised, OK is recognizable and pronounceable in almost every language on earth.
The late Columbia Professor Allen Walker Read tracked down the first known published appearance of OK with its current meaning in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839: “The ‘Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Balls’ is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train-band, would have the ‘contribution box,’ et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.”
Dr. Read demonstrated that OK started life as an obscure joke and through a twist of fate went to the top of the charts on the American hit parade of words. In the 1830s, in New England, there was a craze for initialisms, in the manner of LOL, OMG, aka, and TGIF, so popular today. The fad went so far as to generate letter combinations of intentionally comic misspellings: KG for “know go,” KY for “know yuse,” NSMJ for “’nough said ‘mong jentlemen,” and OR for “oll rong.” OK for “oll korrect” naturally followed.
Of all those loopy initialisms and jocular misspellings OK alone survived. That’s because of a presidential nickname that consolidated the letters in the national memory. Martin Van Buren, elected our eighth president in 1836, was born in Kinderhook, New York, and, early in his political career, was dubbed “Old Kinderhook.” Echoing the “oll korrect” initialism, OK became the rallying cry of the Old Kinderhook Club, a Democratic organization supporting Van Buren during the 1840 campaign. Thus, the accident of Van Buren’s birthplace rescued OK from the dustbin of history.
The coinage did Van Buren no good, and he was defeated in his bid for reelection. But OK has become what H. L. Mencken identified as “the most shining and successful Americanism ever invented.”
(See CANDIDATE, COOL, FILIBUSTER, HOAGIE, IDIOT, OSTRACIZE, POLITICS, RADAR.)
Orange. A number of words, such as breadth, depth, fifth, gulf, and month, are famous for being unrhymable. A spectrum of color words—most colorfully orange, purple, and silver—are often cited as having no words that rhyme with them. But they do.
One Henry Honeychurch Gorringe was a naval commander who in the mid-nineteenth century oversaw the transport of the obelisk Cleopatra’s Needle to New York’s Central Park. Pouncing on this event, the poet Arthur Guiterman wrote:
In Sparkhill buried lies a man of mark
Who brought the Obelisk to Central Park,
Redoubtable Commander H.H. Gorringe,
Whose name supplies the long-sought rhyme for orange.
Or you can bend the rules of line breaks and sound as Willard Espy did:
Four engineers
Wear orange brassieres.
So orange is rhymable, as are purple - curple: “headquarters, especially of a horse”—and silver - chilver: “a ewe lamb.”
Orthography—from the Greek ortho 
: “straight, correct” + gráphein: “to write”—is a fancy word for spelling. The number of words that cause writers orthographic trouble is relatively small, and they tend to be the common words. According to a swatch of studies, the most frequently misspelled words and word groups are: (1) there-their-they’re, (2) to-too-two, (3) receive, (4) existence-existent, (5) occur-occurred-occurrence-occurring, (6) definite-definitely-definition, (7) separate-separation, (8) belief-believe, (9) occasion-occasional, and (10) lose-losing.
That line-up doesn’t include its-it’s, which is so frequently messed up that it is a category unto itself, a perfect storm of misspelling and mispunctuation.
A spectre is haunting the English-speaking world—the spectre of the gratuitous apostrophe. It’s is so often employed as a possessive pronoun, when its is the correct choice, that it’s has become a category of grammatical atrocity unto itself. If you feel that the gratuitous apostrophe (I call it a “prespostrophe”) doesn’t really make any difference, consider the two sentences below and determine which dog has the upper paw:
(1) A clever dog knows its master.
(2) A clever dog knows it’s master.
Speaking of dogs, the most misspelled dog breed is the name for those handsome canines with the short white coat and the dappling of black spots. No, I’m not talking about Dalmations. I’m talking about Dalmatians, so spelled because the breed is said to have originated in Dalmatia, a peninsula on the Adriatic Sea.
If you think that correct spelling doesn’t matter, have a look at these orthographical blunders:
Ostracize. The verb to ostracize means “to exclude from a group by popular consent,” and hidden in that verb is an oyster. Rather than clamming up and floundering around, let’s go fishing for the animal origin of ostracize.
Oysters (from the Greek óstreon 
, “hard shell”) were a staple of the ancient Greek diet. In ancient Athens, a citizen could be banished by popular vote of other citizens, who gathered in the marketplace and wrote down the name of the undesirable on a tile or potsherd. If enough votes were dropped into an urn, the spurned citizen was sent from the city for five or ten years. Because the shards of pottery resembled an oyster, they were called ostrakismós 
, the Greek word for “oyster shell,” whence our verb for general exclusion.
Centuries after the ostrakismós, Italians used small balls or pebbles to vote, “casting” them into one box or another. Hence, the word ballot, “a small ball or pebble.”
(See BUFFALO, BUTTERFLY, CANARY, CLAM, CRESTFALLEN, DACHSHUND, DANDELION, HORSEFEATHERS, PARTRIDGE, PEDIGREE, TAD, TURKEY, VACCINATE, ZYZZYVA.)
Out. Here’s a little finger exercise. Remember that I’m the teacher, so you must try to do what I ask. Make a circle with the fingers on your left hand by touching the tip of your index finger to the tip of your thumb. Now poke your head through that circle.
If you unsuccessfully tried to fit your head through the small digital circle, you (and almost any reader) thought that the phrase “poke your head” meant that your head was the poker. But if you raised your left hand with the circle of fingers up close to your forehead and poked your right index finger through that circle until it touched your forehead, you realized that the phrase “poke your head” has a second, and opposite, meaning: that the head is the pokee. Such words and compounds are called Janus-faced words or contronyms.
Here are two sentences that will solidify your understanding of how contronyms work:
“The moon is VISIBLE tonight.”
“The lights in the old house are always INVISIBLE.”
Although the two capitalized words are opposite in meaning, both can be replaced by the same word—out. When the moon or sun or stars are out, they are visible. When the lights are out, they are invisible.
Here are some contronymic words that show how words wander wondrously and testify to the fact that nothing in the English language is absolute:
(See OUTGOING, RAISE.)
Outgoing. What two words in the English language are synonyms but also, without changing anything in the two words, antonyms?
The answer is retiring and outgoing. They’re synonyms that mean “leaving the job”: “Sally is the retiring Head of Technical Services”; “Sally is the outgoing Head of Technical Services.” But they’re also antonyms that mean “shy” and “effervescent”: “Sally is retiring in social situations”; “Sally is outgoing in social situations.”
(See OUT, RAISE.)
Overstuffed houses four consecutive letters of the alphabet, rstu, in order. Overstudious, understudy, and superstud are the only other common words that do that. The more arcane gymnophobia, “the fear of nudity,” includes the sequence mnop.
Oxymoron. An oxymoron is not a big, dumb cow. Rather, an oxymoron is a figure of speech in which two incongruous, contradictory terms are yoked together in a small space. Self-referentially, the word oxymoron is itself oxymoronic because it is formed from two Greek roots of opposite meaning—oxýs 
, “sharp, keen,” and mōros 
, “foolish,” the same root that gives us the word moron.
Close kin to oxymoron is sophomore, a juxtaposition of the Greek sophós 
, “wisdom,” as in sophisticated, “wise in the ways of the world,” and the abovementioned moros, “foolish.” Many a sophomore is indeed a wise fool.
Other single-word oxymorons include firewater, spendthrift, wholesome, superette (“large small”), Connecticut (“Connect. I cut.”), and the name Noyes (“No yes”).
Literary oxymorons, created accidentally on purpose, include Geoffrey Chaucer’s hateful good, Edmund Spenser’s proud humility, John Milton’s darkness visible, Alexander Pope’s “damn with faint praise,” Lord Byron’s melancholy merriment, James Thomson’s expressive silence, Alfred Lord Tennyson’s falsely true, Ernest Hemingway’s scalding coolness, and, the most quoted of all, William Shakespeare’s “parting is such sweet sorrow.”
Among the best two-word oxymora are jumbo shrimp, military intelligence, political science, good grief, sight unseen, negative growth, and flat busted.
I can only hope that this dissertation on the oxymoron will not go over like a lead balloon.
(See CHIASMUS, IRONY, HYSTERON PROTERON, IRONY, METAPHOR, METONYMY, PARADOX, ZEUGMA.)
Oy, oy vay, and oy vay is mir are Yiddish words that mean literally “Oh, pain.” These words also constitute an entire vocabulary. Oy vay and oy can express any emotion from mild pleasure to vaulting pride, from mild relief to lament through a vale of tears. Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity laid the theoretical foundation for the building of the atom bomb. When the great scientist received the news of the mass destruction wrought by the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he reacted with two Yiddish words often invoked in such black circumstances: “Oy vay.”
When Isaac Bashevis Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, he remarked in his acceptance speech: “The high honor bestowed upon me is also a recognition of the Yiddish language—a language of exile, without a land, without frontiers, not supported by any government, a language which possesses no words for weapons, ammunition, military exercises, war tactics. There is a quiet humor in Yiddish and a gratitude for every day of life, every crumb of success, each encounter of love. In a figurative way, Yiddish is the wise and humble language of us all, the idiom of a frightened and hopeful humanity.”
Most of us already speak a fair amount of Yiddish without fully realizing that we do. Almost a hundred Yiddish words have become part of our everyday conversations, including:
… and so on through the whole megillah, or long, involved story.
Oz. He wrote under the pseudonyms Schuyler Stanton, Floyd Akers, and Edith Van Dyne, but he is best known as L. Frank Baum. In 1900, he sat down to create a children’s book about a girl named Dorothy, who was swept away to a fantastic land inhabited by munchkins and witches and a scarecrow, a tin man, and a lion.
The fairy tale began as a bedtime story for Baum’s children and their friends and soon spilled over into several evening sessions. During one of the tellings, Baum was asked the name of the strange place to which Dorothy was transported. Glancing about the room, Baum’s eyes fell upon the drawers of a filing cabinet labeled “A-N” and “O-Z.”
Noting that the letters on the second label spelled out the ahs uttered by his rapt listeners, Baum named his fantastic land Oz. Ever since, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz has lived in the hearts of children—and grown-ups. Translated into at least thirty languages, it is the best-selling juvenile book of all time.
(See CATCH-22, CHARACTONYM, CHORTLE, DOGHOUSE, NERD, PANDEMONIUM, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE.)