It's just three little letters, but Yes can say
so much.
Yes
Yes is a
very old word. It entered English before 900, and comes from the Old English
word gese loosely meaning "be it." Before the
1600s, yes was often used only as an affirmative to a negative
question, and yea was used as the all-purpose way to say
"yes."
Aye
This archaism is still
used as the formal response meaning "yes" in the British House of
Commons. It is also an accepted substitute for yea in a voice vote in the US House of
Representatives. When it first entered English, it was often spelled I. Etymologists don't know
where it came from, but it appeared suddenly in the late 1500s and is still
with us.
Indubitably
The word indubitably, like many words
with a negative prefix, comes from its internal root, dubitable. Strangely though,
the negative variation has always been more popular than its root. They both
come from the Latin word dubitare meaning
"to doubt."
OK
The origin of this common
Americanism has been disputed, but it most likely came from the 1840 American
presidential election in which politicos facetiously misspelled all correct as oll korrect and
abbreviated it OK. The
alternately spelled okay arose
in the early 1900s. There are other apocryphal tales of it coming from military
jargon, but we'll leave those for another day.
Sure
Sure is related to the Old French word of the
same spelling which meant "safe" or "secure." The word was
used to mean "safe" until the early 1500s. In the mid-1500s, sure started to take on
senses of "certainly" and "indubitably," which helped
introduce popular phrases such as "to be sure" and "for
sure" to English speakers. The common Americanism "sure
thing" arose in the 1800s.
Yeah
This common casual
variation of yes arose
in the early 20th century in America. It is likely a drawled version of its
formal cousin. Since the 1980s, its usage has risen dramatically, more than
three times its previous usage.
Yay
This possible alternative
spelling of yeah appeared
in the 1960s, and may be a variation on the word hooray. However, it remains the least used among
our yes alternatives.
And how!
If the aforementioned yes alternatives are too
run-of-the-mill for your tastes, try and
how! This Americanism emerged in the 1800s and is used in a number of
affirming ways, along the lines of "no mistake, very much so!" "certainly!"
and "you bet!"