Entry · catalog no. 5579

copasetic

/ 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 copasetic.”

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

First known print use, Irving Bacheller's novel A Man for the Ages

1920

Black songwriters Tom Delaney and Sidney Easton use it in "At the New Jump Steady Ball"

1930s

Bill "Bojangles" Robinson popularizes it and claims to have coined it

Region of origin

West

Midwest

N.East

South

Nationwide / diaspora

south · 1910s

Spoken by

Black vaudeville and tap performers; carried by Bill "Bojangles" Robinson

$COPASEThe Record · cultural traction

▲ Faded

107 yrs

ahead of the mainstream

70/100

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.

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Atlanta, GA

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Memphis, TN

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Citations & Sources

■

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

submitted

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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

copacetic