Where Does the Word OK Come From?

What did OK stand for when it first appeared in 1839?

In the 1830s, Boston newspapers had a comic habit of shrinking a phrase to its initials and then explaining it in parentheses.^[1] Some of the abbreviations were misspelled on purpose to add to the joke.^[1] One example was O.W. for "oll wright," a mock spelling of "all right."^[6] Allen Walker Read, the scholar who later traced the history of OK, described New England at the time as caught up in "a remarkable vogue of using abbreviations."^[3]

OK came out of this fad.^[6] On March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post printed "o.k." on its second page, in the middle of a long paragraph, followed by the words "all correct."^[5] The item was a satirical piece about a rival newspaper, the Providence Journal.^[3] The Post's editor, Charles Gordon Greene, is named as the writer.^[3][7] The letters stood for "oll korrect," a deliberately wrong spelling of "all correct."^[1][3] The joke was that neither the O nor the K was correct.^[1]

The 1839 item is the earliest record of OK, but the American Heritage Dictionary says the word was probably in circulation before that date.^[1] According to Doug Harper, creator of the Online Etymology Dictionary, it had also appeared in The Baltimore Sun by July 1839.^[4]

How did the 1840 election and "Old Kinderhook" spread OK?

Most of the joke abbreviations of 1839 are long gone.^[7] OK outlived them because it was taken up in the 1840 presidential campaign.^[1]

President Martin Van Buren was running for re-election that year.^[1] He was born in Kinderhook, New York, and was nicknamed Old Kinderhook, which gave the same two initials.^[1][2] His supporters set up O.K. Clubs and used "Vote for OK" as a slogan.^[3][4] In New York, the older joke and the new nickname reinforced each other.^[6]

Van Buren's opponents used the word too.^[4] Some newspapers claimed that OK came from a spelling blunder by former president Andrew Jackson, a story meant to mock him.^[4] Allan Metcalf, the author of a book about OK, calls the story of a president who could not spell a false tale.^[5]

Van Buren lost the election to William Henry Harrison, but the campaign gave OK national exposure.^[7] Within a decade, people were marking OK on documents and using it on the telegraph to signal that all was well.^[5]

Who proved where OK came from, and when?

The origin of OK was debated by scholars for many years.^[1] The person who documented the 1839 origin was Allen Walker Read, a professor at Columbia University.^[6] He set out his findings in a series of articles in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964.^[6] Smithsonian Magazine dates the work more loosely, to the mid-1960s.^[3] Read disproved the earlier theories one after another, then traced how OK spread stage by stage.^[3]

The American Heritage Dictionary credits Read with showing that OK is based on a joke, and gives the word's origin as an abbreviation of "oll korrect."^[1] Oxford's learner's dictionary is a little more cautious: it says OK is "probably" an abbreviation of "orl korrect," its spelling of the joke phrase.^[2]

What other theories exist, and why do most scholars reject them?

Many other explanations were put forward over the years, mainly by amateur etymologists.^[6] Some looked to other languages: a Choctaw word, "okeh," meaning "it is so"; the Scottish "och aye"; or the French "aux quais," meaning "at the quays."^[6] According to Smithsonian Magazine, Germans traced it to the military rank Oberst Kommandant, the French to Aux Cayes, a port town in Haiti, and others to "open key," a telegraph term.^[3] Still others chose a person's initials, such as Orrin Kendall, who supplied crackers to Union troops in the Civil War.^[6]

In the 1960s the folk singer Pete Seeger sang that "Choctaw gave us the word OK," a belief NPR says was widely held at the time but proved wrong.^[4] Metcalf argues that the borrowing ran the other way: once OK's origin was forgotten, it was taken into Choctaw, whose "okeh" meant something like "it is so."^[5] Early in the twentieth century, President Woodrow Wilson marked "okeh" on documents he approved.^[5]

A 2011 article in the journal of the Dictionary Society of North America, quoted by NPR, called early efforts to explain OK "imaginative at best, without documentation."^[4] Read's account, by contrast, rests on examples printed in Boston newspapers in 1839.^[6] The theories that trace OK itself to Jackson or to Van Buren were not right either.^[6]

NPR reports that most scholars now follow Read's conclusions, though some people still dispute them.^[4] In 1975, Frank Greco of Rockefeller University suggested in American Speech that OK might have several origins, including "och aye," that merged over time.^[3] Smithsonian Magazine still calls Read's theory one of the most convincing explanations.^[3]

How did OK spread around the world?

For a long time OK was generally avoided outside business, except in the speech of fictional characters meant to seem rustic or illiterate.^[5] In the twentieth century it moved into the mainstream.^[5]

Read found OK in use abroad as early as 1904 and suggested that American soldiers spread it further during World War II.^[7] When American troops arrived in Tuscany in 1944, local peasants called them "Gli Ochei."^[7]

As Neil Armstrong prepared to take his first step on the Moon, the message from Houston was, "OK, Neil, we can see you coming down the ladder now."^[4]

Is it spelled OK, O.K. or okay?

The word was originally spelled with periods.^[1] Today it is written O.K., OK, o.k., ok or okay.^[6] Both the American Heritage Dictionary and Oxford's learner's dictionary list "okay" as an alternative to OK.^[1][2] Associated Press style recommends "OK" with no periods.^[4]

Sources disagree about the age of the longer spelling.^[5][7] Metcalf writes that "okay" is relatively recent and still relatively rare.^[5] The University of Illinois blog The Web of Language says OK was respelled as "okay" soon after it was coined.^[7]