'I'm good' vs. 'I'm well'

“How are you doing?”

“I’m good, thanks.”

Does this answer make you cringe? If so, you’ll be disappointed to hear who says it, often, in grocery store checkout lines, when greeting friends and when meeting new people: your local grammar columnist.

I say “I’m good” all the time, knowing that a lot of language buffs see that as an error. To them, “I’m good” means either I’m virtuous (a good girl) or highly skilled at something (good at math.)

Their preference is legitimate. “I’m well” is more proper. It’s definitely the answer you want to give in white collar job interviews or when setting an example for children. But “I’m good” is an acceptable way to say “I’m well.” And it’s my preferred alternative anytime “I’m well” feels too formal or snooty, which is most of the time. I find my justification in the dictionary.

Look up “good” in Merriam-Webster and you’ll see a lot of stuff you expected: 1. “of favorable character or tendency,” as in “good news, good fortune, good grades or a good feeling about the game.” The next definitions also line up with expectations: 2. “bountiful, fertile: good land,” 3. “handsome, attractive: good looks” and 4. “of a high or desired quality: we ate at a good restaurant.”

If you stopped reading definitions at that point, you would continue to think it’s wrong to say “I’m good” when talking about health. But if you read all the way down to Merriam’s eighth definition of “good,” you’ll see this: “free from injury, sickness, or disease.”

In other words, “good” can mean “well.” So when someone asks how I am doing and I answer, “I’m good,” no grammar rules are broken.

People who oppose “I’m good,” in my experience, have difficulty explaining why they think “well” is the only correct option. In many cases, they say it’s because “good” is an adjective and “well” is an adverb. That sounds like a solid argument at first. But on closer inspection, it doesn’t hold up.

Yes, “well” is the adverb form of “good”: I do well at math because I’m good at math. But that’s not the form of “well” you use in “I am well.” That “well” is a completely different word — an adjective that means “in good health.”

The structure of our reply proves it. A sentence that begins with “I’m” or “I am” calls for an adjective, not an adverb, to modify the pronoun “I.” That’s a job for adjectives. “I’m happily” and “I am correctly” illustrate how adverbs don’t work in this structure. Therefore, just as “I’m happy” and “I am correct” use adjectives, so does “I am well” — and so does “I am good,” no matter your definition of good.

This business is even more confusing when you consider what happens in this exchange:

“How are you doing?”

“I’m doing well, thanks.”

In this case, “well” is the way to go, not because you need the adjective “well” to describe your health but because you need the adverb “well” to modify the verb “doing.”

For that reason, you’ll probably want to opt for “I’m doing well” instead of “I’m doing good.” But as regular readers of this column may have anticipated, there’s a twist. “I’m doing good” is poor form, but it’s not exactly wrong. Dictionaries do allow “good” to be used as an adverb, in which case it’s synonymous with the adverb form of “well.”

If this is more effort than you want to put into a simple greeting in the grocery store checkout, just follow this simple guide: “Well” is always right and proper. “Good” is always technically OK, though not always proper.

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2026 at 2:40 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.