" OK " is probably themost speak wordin the world — besides English , the great unwashed say " OK " in a XII languages , admit Spanish , Italian and Russian — and yet almost nobody can severalize you what those two alphabetic character stand for or where the word came from .
Was it borrowed from theindigenous Choctaw word"okeh , " meaning , roughly , " OK " ? Did it originate with a Boston bread maker name Otto Kimmel who liked tofrost his initialsinto his cookies ? Does it have anything to do with the body politic of Oklahoma ( OK ) or the melodious " Oklahoma ! " ?
Nope , nope and nope . In fact , there’sno evidencethat " okeh " was part of the Chocktaw language .
" OK is the greatest American word , " saysAnatoly Liberman , a linguistic scientist , translator and spoken language professor at the University of Minnesota . " The history of OK is a history of incredible success , but nobody could have predicted that success . "
As you ’ll see , OK began as a piece of insider slang from the former 1830s and rode a ( losing ) presidential campaign to countrywide fame and eventually worldwide ubiquitousness .
The Acronym Craze of the 1830s
In the early nineteenth century , new printing technologies dramatically reduce the cost of publishing a daily newspaper , and there was a resulting explosion of inexpensive fresh daily known jointly as thepenny press . compete for readers , cent papers in cities like New York , Philadelphia and Boston published not only straight news stories , but also witty takes on the latest political scandals , social scenes and popular trend .
opine of it as the internet of the 1830s . And much like the internet , the full of life back - and - forth chatter between centime report editors give giving birth to a new way of penning and finally a new agency of speaking .
" Beginning in the summer of 1838 , there developed in Boston a remarkable vogue of using abbreviations . It might well be called a craze,“wrotethe famed etymologistAllen Walker Read , who was the first person to trace the full history of OK .
Take these illustration from Boston ’s Morning Post , whose editor , Charles Gordon Greene , pitter-patter his columns with winking acronym for everything and anything :
By 1939 , the " initial linguistic communication , " as it was sometimes called , had arrived in New York City and had already leapt from photographic print to fashionable slang . " This is a species of spoken shorthand , which is getting into very general use among loafers and gentlemen of the fancy,“wrote the editorsof New York ’s Evening Tattler .
The editor even claim to have overhear a conversation between two young steady , where the girl turned to her beau and said , " O.K.K.B.W.P. " " What could she have meant , " wrote the Evening Tattler , " but ' One form Kiss Before We Part ' ? "
Misspelling Words Was Also a Thing
In addition to the abbreviation fury , nineteenth - century Americans cerebrate it was really mirthful to designedly misspell stuff . Read , the etymologist , cited the example of the laughable author George W. Arnold , who used the pen name " Joe Strickland " to compose mangled letter to his fictitious family , like this one from a trip abroad : " when I gravel here tha axt me if I was evver in Turky before . no ses I. but i ’ve had a darn menny turkey in me . "
By the late 1830s , the ( screaming ) misspelling trend had combined with the acronym craze to produce punchy abbreviation like :
Absolutely no one articulate K.G. or O.W. anymore , but believe it or not , that witty pun laid the groundwork for the comer of a two - letter abbreviation that would seize the world .
The Very First Use of OK
Before we get to the foreboding date of March 21 , 1839 , have ’s tap our hats one more time to Allen Walker Read , the man who solve the secret of OK ’s origins . Keep in mind that Read was form in the 1960s , decades before searchable digital newspaper archive .
" Read must have spent hundred of hour digging through tons and long ton of physical paper , journal , private letters and other documents , " says Liberman , who write the weeklyOxford Etymologistblog and know firsthand how hard it is to traverse down the story of words . " What that mankind did was utterly astounding . "
OK , back to our story .
In the natural spring of 1839 , the editor of Boston ’s Morning Post , Charles Gordon Greene , was engaged in some dependable - natured tripe talk with the editors of the Providence Journal in Rhode Island . It had to do with a semi - satirical citizens group in Boston called the Anti - Bell - Ringing Society ( or A.B.R.S. ) , of which Greene was a member .
The Providence paper poked fun at Greene and the A.B.R.S. and Greene had to put the record book straight person . So it was that on March 21 , 1839 , at the remnant of a poor paragraph champion the A.B.R.S. , Greene print the following words : " o.k . — all right . "
See what he did there ? Similar to using O.W. for " oll wright , " Greene had strike a new misspelled acronym : O.K. for " oll korrect . " Three days after Greene bring in OK to the world , the Providence Journal editors reply with an " O.K. " of their own .
Like other offbeat acronyms of the solar day , O.K. was an inside joke randomly thrust into general circulation . But unlike O.W. or K.G. , which enjoyed brief popularity in the 1830s , O.K. did n’t kick the bucket out .
" Nobody knew that this bantering abbreviation would have such a long and well-chosen aliveness , " say Liberman .
“Old Kinderhook” Takes “OK” National
If you reckon that the word OKoriginatedwith Martin Van Buren , you ’d be half correct . The eighth president of the United Stateshailed from the small townof Kinderhook , New York . Like his mentor and fellow Democrat Andrew Jackson , who was known as " Old Hickory , " Van Buren ’s nickname was " Old Kinderhook . "
In the 1840 presidential election , William Henry Harrison and the Whig company gainsay the incumbent Van Buren . Harrison ’s supporters came up with the catchy ( for its fourth dimension ) hunting expedition slogan ( and song ) , " Tippecanoe and Tyler Too . " The Democrats swung back with a motto of their own : " O.K.“As in , " Old Kinderhook is o.k. ! "
" [ Van Buren ] find the nickname Old Kinderhook , and too soon in 1840 , OK gild form up with the slogan , ' OK is OK . ' So pick out that funny small word and make it a backbone of the political conversation in 1840 , dead OK waswayOK , " said the former polyglot Allan Metcalfin a 2010 NPR interview . Metcalf was the author of " fine : The Improbable Story of America ’s Greatest Word . " Van Buren lost disadvantageously , but OK by all odds succeed .
After 1840 , the Word of God spread like wildfire and never look back . to begin with , all right look in telegraphy messages ( which may report for its external spread ) and document but not in everyday speech as it was " slangy . " But that changed over time .
In an clause for BBC Magazine , Metcalf speculated as to why OK was democratic all over the world : " It ’s not that it was needed to ' make full a gap ' in any language . Before 1839 , English speakers had ' yes , ' ' good , ' ' all right , ' ' excellent , ' ' satisfactory ' and ' all right . ' What OK provide that the others did not was neutrality , a way to aver or to express agreement without having to offer up an view . … OK allow us to view a position in simple-minded term , just OK or not . "
