What do you think of this fact?
You probably say it several times a day, and it works from Berlin to Tokyo. “OK” is one of the most widespread words there is. Yet it started out as a pretty silly gag.
A Boston trend
In the late 1830s, a language fad was all the rage in the US, especially around Boston: people abbreviated phrases and deliberately misspelled them along the way. “Know go” for “no go” became “KG,” “know yuse” for “no use” became “KY,” and “oll wright” for “all right” became “OW.” Basically a 19th-century spelling meme.
On March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post printed “o.k.”, short for “oll korrect,” meaning “all correct,” misspelled on purpose. The man behind it was editor Charles Gordon Greene. It’s the earliest known use of the word in print.
Saved by an election
Most of these joke abbreviations vanished quickly. “OK” got lucky: in 1840, President Martin Van Buren ran for reelection. He came from Kinderhook, New York, and went by the nickname “Old Kinderhook.” His supporters formed an “O.K. Club,” and suddenly the abbreviation was everywhere.
Then technology lent a hand. According to the Farmers’ Almanac, “OK” also spread via telegraph because it was short, unambiguous and easy to send over the wire. On top of that, it was a handy way to quickly mark approval on documents.
The word detective
We know “OK” comes from Boston mostly thanks to linguist Allen Walker Read. In the 1960s, he dug through old newspapers and found the 1839 citation. That settled a lot of other theories, like the idea that “OK” came from the Choctaw language or from Greek. None of them has any evidence older than that Boston newspaper.
US President Woodrow Wilson reportedly wrote the word as “okeh,” because he believed in the Choctaw theory.
So the world’s most successful abbreviation is a spelling mistake made on purpose.