What does kudos mean?

Praise or credit for an achievement. It comes from the Greek kydos, meaning glory or renown, and entered English as university slang in the nineteenth century. At work it now means a short public thank you to a colleague.

Kudos. The word is singular in Greek and in standard English; the final s is part of the word, not a plural. “Kudo” appears from people assuming otherwise, and it is generally treated as an error, though it is common enough that some dictionaries now list it.

How do you give good kudos at work?

Name the person, name the thing they did, and say what it changed. “Kudos to Amara for the runbook, I followed it cold and nothing broke” does all three. “Kudos Amara!” does one.

Recognition glossary

Kudos

Kudos is informal praise or credit given for a specific achievement, and in workplace software the word has come to mean a short public message of thanks sent to a colleague, often through a dedicated channel or tool.

Kudos is a Greek word for glory that ended up as the name of a Slack channel. The journey says something about what recognition became.

From glory to a channel name

Kydos in ancient Greek meant glory, the kind won in battle or in the games. It reached English in the early nineteenth century as slang at Cambridge and Oxford, where a student who did well in an exam was said to have earned kudos, with a slightly ironic edge to the borrowing. The word stayed literary and faintly jokey for a century and a half.

The workplace adopted it because it was short, positive and unclaimed. When teams started setting up a channel for saying thank you, “kudos” fitted the tab, and by the late 2010s it was the default name in enough companies that recognition tools began using it as a noun for the message itself: you send a kudos, you receive kudos, the kudos feed.

What one contains

A useful kudos has three parts, and the examples on this site’s shoutout ideas page all have them. The person’s name, so that it is about someone. The thing they did, in enough detail that it could not be about anyone else. And the consequence, which is the part people usually leave out and the part that tells the recipient something they did not already know.

“Kudos to Amara for the runbook” has two of the three. “I followed it cold on Saturday and nothing went wrong, which has never happened before” supplies the consequence, and turns a pat on the back into information.

How the channel decays

Every kudos channel starts specific and drifts towards reactions. The first month has paragraphs. By the sixth, a name and a clapping emoji is the norm, because the emoji is faster and nobody has said that it is not enough.

The decay is reversible. A manager who posts one full-sentence kudos each week resets the standard for everyone reading. A tool that asks “what did they do?” before sending nudges the same way. What does not work is a rule, because rules about how to say thank you get ignored on principle.

Kudos, shoutouts and the rest

Kudos and shoutouts are near synonyms in practice. A shoutout leans slightly more towards the public announcement; kudos leans slightly more towards credit for a specific piece of work. Both are forms of informal and usually peer-to-peer recognition, and in a company with both channels the difference is mostly historical accident.

What it looks like

In the #kudos channel: “Kudos to Amara for rewriting the deployment runbook. I followed it cold on Saturday and nothing went wrong, which has never happened before.”
A team lead ends the sprint review with a round of kudos, asking each person to name one colleague and one specific thing from the fortnight.
A company’s kudos channel has been reduced to reactions: a name, a clapping emoji and nothing else. Nobody reading it a week later can say what any of it was for.

Questions people ask

What does kudos mean?: Praise or credit for an achievement. It comes from the Greek kydos, meaning glory or renown, and entered English as university slang in the nineteenth century. At work it now means a short public thank you to a colleague.
Is it kudos or kudo?: Kudos. The word is singular in Greek and in standard English; the final s is part of the word, not a plural. “Kudo” appears from people assuming otherwise, and it is generally treated as an error, though it is common enough that some dictionaries now list it.
How do you give good kudos at work?: Name the person, name the thing they did, and say what it changed. “Kudos to Amara for the runbook, I followed it cold and nothing broke” does all three. “Kudos Amara!” does one.