all right: Style Guide Spelling Decisions (AP, Chicago, MLA, APA)

How major style guides rule on "all right"

Major style guides reject 'alright'; Garner's calls it 'still considered nonstandard'. Merriam-Webster marks it as a variant.

The disagreement on "all right" is an example of register: formal style versus informal usage, the category of style-guide differences that most often confuses copy editors and creates inconsistency across long documents. Below is a guide-by-guide breakdown, drawn directly from the published editions cited.

What the divergence actually means

Unlike many compound-modernization decisions where style guides eventually converge, "all right" continues to show genuine divergence between major guides. The AP Stylebook treats this as a settled call; Chicago Manual leaves more flexibility; and Merriam-Webster, as a descriptive dictionary, records both forms. Source: Chicago Manual of Style, 17th Edition

The APA Publication Manual aligns with AP and Chicago on "all right", though APA generally addresses spelling questions only when they intersect with statistical reporting or technical psychology vocabulary. Where the manual is silent, APA defers to Merriam-Webster as its standard reference. Source: APA Publication Manual, 7th Edition

Merriam-Webster lists "all right (also alright)", which serves as the lexicographic baseline for U.S. style decisions. Because Merriam-Webster's entries reflect aggregated published usage rather than editorial preference, when a guide says "follow Merriam-Webster", as APA does, that effectively delegates the call to whichever spelling has dominated the published corpus. Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary

Garner's Modern English Usage classifies the "all right" / "alright" pair on its Language-Change Index, a five-stage scale measuring whether a once-disputed form has been accepted into Standard English. For register: formal style versus informal usage, Garner's typically rates the dominant form at Stage 4 ("ubiquitous but objected to by traditionalists") or Stage 5 ("fully accepted"). Source: Garner's Modern English Usage, 5th Edition

Practical guidance for editors

For working writers, the practical rule is straightforward: in journalism, follow AP; in academic writing in the humanities, follow MLA or Chicago; in social-science publishing, follow APA; in book publishing, follow Chicago. When no house style applies, Merriam-Webster's main entry is the safest default. The differences across these guides on "all right" reflect not disagreement about correctness but different audiences and editorial pressures.

Editorial context

Google Books Ngrams Viewer charts for American English reveal "all right" decisively outpacing "alright" across two centuries of published books, with the one-word variant appearing sporadically after 1900 before surging post-1960 yet never crossing over, remaining less than half as frequent by 2008. This enduring imbalance underscores the influence of editorial standards on formal corpora, contrasting with "alright"'s unchecked rise in unedited digital texts, song lyrics, and social media. A concrete illustration appears in casual narrative: She said everything would be alright in the end., where the fused form conveys spoken contraction but invites revision to "all right" in print to align with historical precedent and avoid ambiguity with the adjective "all-right" meaning satisfactory. Such data equip editors to weigh corpus frequency against informality, preserving clarity amid usage drift.

Cross-references

For the dictionary entry, frequency data, and pronunciation of all, see the main word page. For other style-guide spelling decisions in this category, browse all style-guide spelling rulings.