Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

From military lingo:

"Roger" meaning "Received and understood"... exactly what you're looking for "I acknowledge what you said". Sometimes used as "Roger that"

I learned this in the army and still use often in conversation or text.



I worked a job where I would use roger in this sense. After I put in my 2 week's notice, a coworker told me that this actually annoyed my boss to no end. We used IRC extensively for communications, so I wrote an IRC bot that would reply "roger" to everything he said (along with some other sayings that annoyed him) and cron'd it to run a week after I had left.*

* The rest of the story is that I wrote two bots to say different things, but forgot that they'd trigger "roger" off of each other, so the end result is that I had two bots constantly spamming the channel with "roger". I guess I should have written tests!


IIRC, "Roger" came about in the early days of voice-radio communication as the old-style phonetic alphabet version of "R" (in the modern phonetic alphabet, "R" would be "Romeo") ; the single letter R was a "prosign" abbreviation used in Morse-code telegraphy (as • — • or dot-dash-dot) to indicate "received and understood." [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code_abbreviations


I can't help but think of the battle droids in the (mythical) Star Wars prequels. Roger Roger.

And now you'll be thinking that all day. Sorry.


Except that colloquially it seems to be used basically like ok, particularly with the roger that


But then what happens when you hire someone named Roger?



that sounds awful if you speak to someone who's named Roger




Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: