4.05 · Why Do We Say OK?

Why Do We Say OK?

People all over the world say OK every day, in many languages. It may be the world’s most used word. But where did it come from? For a long time, nobody knew for sure.

The answer was found in old newspapers. In the late 1830s, young writers in Boston and New York loved a strange joke. Instead of writing a phrase normally, they spelled it wrong on purpose and shortened it to its first letters. O.W. meant “oll wright” (all right), and K.Y. meant “know yuse” (no use). On March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post printed the first known o.k., short for “oll korrect,” a funny spelling of “all correct.”

Most of these jokes were soon forgotten, but OK got lucky. In 1840, President Martin Van Buren was trying to win a second term. He came from Kinderhook, New York, so his supporters called him “Old Kinderhook” and started “OK Clubs.” Van Buren lost the election, but by then the whole country knew the two letters.

The mystery was solved in the 1960s by Allen Walker Read, a language expert who found the story by reading those old newspapers. Today, OK works as an adjective (The food was OK), a verb (Can you OK my plan?) and even a noun (We got the OK). Not bad for a joke that’s almost two hundred years old.