OK might be the most successful word English has ever produced. People use it in dozens of languages; it is on buttons on almost every computer and phone, and many of us say it hundreds of times a day without a second thought. So where did the word OK come from? For more than a century, nobody really knew, and the true answer, when it was finally found, turned out to be a bad newspaper joke from Boston in 1839.
The false leads
Because OK was everywhere, people came up with all sorts of explanations for it. It was said to come from the Choctaw word okeh, from the Scots och aye, from the Greek ola kala (all good), from the West African Wolof language, from a Haitian port, from German, from Latin, and even from a maker of army biscuits, as Mental Floss lists. US President Woodrow Wilson was so taken with the Choctaw theory that he spelled it okeh, according to History.com. Another popular story claimed that President Andrew Jackson, a poor speller, wrote OK on documents to mean “all correct”. That one was a hoax, and later research showed Jackson was actually a decent speller who never marked OK on anything, as Allan Metcalf, author of a book on the word, told Oxford University Press.
What does OK stand for? A Boston joke
OK stands for “oll korrect”, a deliberately silly spelling of “all correct”. That answer was finally pinned down in the 1960s by Allen Walker Read, a professor at Columbia University in New York, who painstakingly worked through old American newspapers looking for the earliest uses of OK. He found that in the late 1830s, Boston newspapers were in the grip of what he called a remarkable vogue for abbreviations, a craze for jokey initials, often deliberately misspelled, as the Smithsonian explains. Writers used SP for “small potatoes”, OFM for “our first men”, and OW for “oll wright”, a joking spelling of all right.
On Saturday 23 March 1839, the Boston Morning Post published a satirical piece poking fun at a rival paper in Providence, Rhode Island, in a story about a mock organisation called the Anti-Bell Ringing Society. In it, the writer used “o.k.” and explained it to readers as “all correct”, short for the deliberately silly spelling “oll korrect”. The writer was most likely the Post’s editor, Charles Gordon Greene, according to History.com. It was meant as a throwaway gag. Most of the other abbreviations from that craze have long been forgotten, but OK stuck.
Old Kinderhook and the election that saved OK
OK spread a little through other newspapers during 1839, but it could easily have faded away with the rest of the craze. What saved it was a presidential election. In 1840, US President Martin Van Buren was running for a second term. He came from the town of Kinderhook in New York State, and his supporters nicknamed him “Old Kinderhook”. They formed O.K. Clubs across the country and turned the letters into a campaign slogan, giving OK a handy double meaning; Old Kinderhook was all correct, as History.com explains. Van Buren lost the election to William Henry Harrison, but OK won. The campaign made the word known nationally, and it was so successful that many people still believe, wrongly, that OK started as “Old Kinderhook”.
From the telegraph to the Moon
Once OK was widely known, it turned out to be extremely useful. It was short, easy to say and easy to write, and its spread was helped along by the arrival of the telegraph, as Merriam-Webster notes. The spelled-out version, okay, came later. From there, OK spread around the world, and today it is understood even in places where English is not widely spoken. Metcalf even argues that OK can lay claim to being the first word spoken on the Moon, as World Wide Words notes in its review of his book.
OK, that is the story
So one of the most useful words in the world began as a deliberately misspelled joke in a Boston newspaper, survived thanks to a losing election campaign, and then had its real origin forgotten for more than a century until a patient researcher dug it back up. Metcalf has even suggested that 23 March, the anniversary of its first appearance, should be celebrated as OK Day. If you enjoy the stories behind words, my posts on the missing letters of the alphabet and where “once in a blue moon” comes from are two more.
Sources
- Smithsonian Magazine: How one man discovered the obscure origins of the word OK
- History.com: The birth of OK, 175 years ago
- Oxford University Press blog: Q&A with Allan Metcalf on OK
- Mental Floss: What’s the real origin of OK?
- Merriam-Webster: The hilarious history of OK
- World Wide Words: Review of OK, the improbable story of America’s greatest word