Entry · catalog no. 5579
copasetic
/ — /pending
adjective · south · 2026
✓ Verified
1.
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.
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
south · 2026
Spoken by
south
$COPASEThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Rising0 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
12/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
2026
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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New Orleans, LA
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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
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+ Cite a sourceOxford English Dictionary, entry "copacetic" — reference · ongoing
submitted
Also spelled
See also