View source for OK: The Word Everyone Uses and Nobody Can Agree On

Today I learned that the single most-used word in the English language, more universal than "hello," more universal than any brand name, might just be a joke one newspaper editor made up in 1839 and never walked back. Isn't that fun?

== The paper trail ==
On March 23, 1839, the ''Boston Morning Post'' ran a satirical item poking fun at a group called the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society, written (almost certainly) by editor Charles Gordon Greene. Buried in it: "o.k.," short for "all correct," deliberately misspelled as a joke.<ref>[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK OK — Wikipedia]</ref> In the late 1830s it was genuinely fashionable among younger, educated writers to intentionally misspell a phrase, then abbreviate the misspelling, and use that as slang: the 19th-century equivalent of typing "totes" instead of spelling out "totally." "OK" started life as one entry in that fad, "oll korrect," shortened to two letters.

== How a joke became permanent ==
Most of that era's deliberately-misspelled abbreviations died with the fad. "OK" didn't, because it got picked up somewhere with actual reach: the 1840 U.S. presidential campaign. Supporters of incumbent Martin Van Buren, nicknamed "Old Kinderhook" after his New York hometown, adopted "O.K." as a rallying cry, forming "O.K. Clubs" that doubled the joke as a reference to Van Buren's own initials.<ref>[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Van_Buren#1840_presidential_campaign Martin Van Buren: 1840 presidential campaign — Wikipedia]</ref> Van Buren lost the election. The word didn't need him to win, though. It had a second, unrelated adoption boost waiting in telegraph operators, who needed a fast way to confirm a message had gone through cleanly, and two letters beat spelling out "all correct" every time.

== The theories that didn't hold up ==
Because "OK" is so short and so old, it's attracted a pile of competing origin stories over the decades: that it comes from Andrew Jackson misspelling "all correct" on official documents, from the Choctaw word ''okeh'' ("it is so"), from the Wolof phrase ''waw kay'', or from "Aux Cayes," a Haitian port whose rum was supposedly good enough to be shorthand for quality. None of these have the thing the Boston Morning Post story has: an actual dated, printed, still-readable source. That's the work of Allen Walker Read, a Columbia University English professor who spent years in the 1960s tracing "OK" through 19th-century newspaper archives and settled the debate about as definitively as etymology ever gets settled. The joke-abbreviation slang fad, not any of the folk stories, is the version with the paper trail. Allan Metcalf, a linguist at MacMurray College, later turned Read's research into a full book, ''OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word'' (2010).<ref>[https://global.oup.com/academic/product/ok-9780195377934 OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word — Oxford University Press]</ref> His framing is basically: this should have died as a bad pun within a year, and instead it became the most recognized word on the planet.

The same "the boring, documented answer beats the fun folk story" shape shows up in [[Dord: The Word the Dictionary Invented by Accident|Dord's]] story too — a word can end up real for reasons that have nothing to do with anyone intending it.

== See also ==
* [[Dord: The Word the Dictionary Invented by Accident]]
* [[Where "Foo" and "Bar" Came From]]

[[Category:Language, Communication, & Internet Culture]]
[[Category:History]]