Where does the word 'OK' come from?

OK started as a joke. It first appeared in the Boston Morning Post on 23 March 1839 as an abbreviation of 'oll korrect', a deliberate misspelling of 'all correct'. The scholar Allen Walker Read documented this in the 1960s, and most scholars now accept his conclusions. A presidential campaign the following year spread the word across the country. [1] [2] [3]

According to Read's research, OK came from two editorial fashions of the late 1830s. One was a fondness for comic initialisms, which began in 1838. The other was deliberate misspelling, which imitated an uneducated country voice. Boston editors, notably Charles Gordon Greene of the Morning Post, enlivened their stories with abbreviations such as 'o.f.m.' for 'our first men' and 'o.w.' for 'all right'. O.W. appeared in the Post on 7 February 1839, about seven weeks before the first OK. [4] [3]

Doug Harper of the Online Etymology Dictionary says the term was probably used in speech before it appeared in print. He compares the fad to Cockney rhyming slang. By the fall of 1839 other Boston papers were using OK, and it had reached New York. By February 1840 it had reached Baltimore, where the Sun used it of a gift of a mint julep. [2] [4]

In 1840 President Martin Van Buren ran for re-election. His nickname was 'Old Kinderhook', after his birthplace in New York, and the initials matched. His supporters formed O.K. Clubs, and the historian Mark Cheathem notes that the match was convenient. Both parties then used the term, and it gained national recognition. Van Buren lost to William Henry Harrison. Some older researchers treated the campaign as the origin of OK, but Read's evidence shows it was how the word spread, not where it came from. [2] [3] [4]

The best-known myth says Andrew Jackson, supposedly a poor speller, coined OK by marking documents as 'all correct'. The OUP blog says the story began as a hoax by a Van Buren detractor in 1840, and that Jackson spelled fairly well and never marked OK on a document. A 1790 Tennessee record that was read as Jackson's 'O.K.' actually says O.R., a scribal note for 'order recorded'. [3] [4]

Another popular claim traces OK to the Choctaw language. It was widely believed in the 1960s, when Pete Seeger sang it, and Woodrow Wilson is said to have believed it and to have spelled the word 'okeh'. Evidence shows it is wrong. Other theories, including French and Scottish roots, have also been proposed without documentation. [2] [3] [4]

NPR notes that some people still dispute the accepted explanation. The Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary words its entry cautiously, giving the origin as 'probably' an abbreviation of 'orl korrect'. [2] [5]