Entry · catalog no. 3765

copacetic

/ /ˌkoʊpəˈsɛtɪk/ /koh-puh-SET-ik

adjective · south · 1910s

✓ Verified

Fine, in order, exactly as it should be. Not merely acceptable — settled.

“Money came through, everything copacetic.”

Origin & Attribution

Black Southern speech, late 1800s. Bill "Bojangles" Robinson used it constantly on the vaudeville stage and in radio work and claimed to have coined it as a shoeshine boy in Richmond, Virginia — but the word appears to have been in Black Southern circulation before he was born in 1878, which makes him its great popularizer rather than its author. In print by 1919, and in the 1920 lyrics of "At the New Jump Steady Ball" by Black songwriters Tom Delaney and Sidney Easton. The many proposed Latin, Yiddish, Italian, and Creole etymologies persist mainly because mainstream lexicography has been slow to credit a Black origin it cannot trace to a European root.

1919

In print in Irving Bacheller's A Man for the Ages

1920

In the lyrics of "At the New Jump Steady Ball" by Tom Delaney and Sidney Easton

1930s

Bill "Bojangles" Robinson carries it through vaudeville and radio

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

The South

south · 1910s

Spoken by

Black Southern speakers; vaudeville and jazz-era entertainers; general American English from the mid-century

$COPACEThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Fading

107 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

45/100

peak cultural energy

Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.

Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest

First used

1919

in the culture

Recorded here

2026

point of first record

Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.

Hear it spoken

By region — how it actually sounds

@nolakid

New Orleans, LA

@htxdri

Houston, TX

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Citations & Sources

■

Irving Bacheller — A Man for the Ages — book · 1919

submitted

■

Tom Delaney and Sidney Easton — "At the New Jump Steady Ball" — song lyric · 1920

submitted

■

Oxford English Dictionary, entry "copacetic" — reference · ongoing

submitted

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Also spelled

copasetic