OK might be the hardest-working word in the English language. It can mean yes, fine, so-so, got it, or "are you sure?" depending on how you say it. It has been described as the most frequently spoken or written word on the planet, and it pops up in languages all over the world. But where did those two little letters come from?
Here's the answer most dictionaries give today. OK began in Boston in the late 1830s as a joke. Writers had a fad of abbreviating deliberately misspelled phrases, and O.K. stood for "oll korrect," a goofy spelling of "all correct." A presidential campaign in 1840 then spread it across the country.
A Fad of Funny Abbreviations
In the summer of 1838, a craze for abbreviations swept Boston's newspapers. Writers tossed around initials like OFM for "our first men," NG for "no go," GT for "gone to Texas," and SP for "small potatoes." Many were comic misspellings, a favorite gag of humorists at the time. One forerunner of OK was OW, for "oll wright."
The earliest known use of O.K. in print appeared on March 23, 1839, in the Boston Morning Post. Editor Charles Gordon Greene used it in a playful piece about a jokey group called the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society, adding the explanation "all correct" right after it. Read later found more early examples. Several came with explanations like "oll korrect," but others appeared with no explanation at all, a hint that readers already knew what it meant.
Most of those abbreviations faded away as fads do. OK did not, thanks to a lucky break that put it in front of the whole nation.
The Presidential Boost
In the 1840 presidential election, President Martin Van Buren was running for reelection. He came from Kinderhook, New York, and his supporters nicknamed him "Old Kinderhook." Democrats claimed OK stood for that nickname. "Vote for OK" was a lot snappier than his Dutch name.
His opponents, the Whigs, fired back with a jab of their own. They said OK came from the bad spelling of Andrew Jackson, Van Buren's predecessor. All that back-and-forth publicity spread OK across the United States almost overnight.
How We Know
Much of this story comes from linguist Allen Walker Read. In a series of six articles in 1963 and 1964, he tracked the word's early history through old newspapers and documents. His work silenced most of the skeptics, and his explanation is now offered in most dictionaries.
Still, the origin of OK is debated. Some scholars argue for roots in West African languages. For years, major American dictionaries pointed to the Choctaw language, which used a particle "okeh" meaning "it is so." Missionaries recorded it as early as 1825.
A President's Spelling
The Choctaw idea had a famous fan. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson signed off on informal memos with "Okeh W. W." When his secretaries were confused, he explained that he'd found the spelling in the Century Dictionary. For a while, "okeh" caught on, and one columnist predicted it would replace "the nonsensical form O.K."
That prediction didn't pan out. Today OK is everywhere, as an adjective, an interjection, a noun, and even a verb, as in "the boss OK'd it." Not bad for a word that started as a newspaper joke about bad spelling. All things considered, it turned out more than OK.
