What does OK actually stand for?
It is probably the most useful word on the planet. It began as a deliberate misspelling in a newspaper joke, and it should not have survived the year.
OK might be the most widely understood word on earth. It crosses languages that share nothing else, it works as a question, an answer, and a shrug, and almost nobody who says it fifty times a day has any idea what it stands for. Ask around and you will get a dozen confident answers. Nearly all of them are wrong.
The true story is smaller and much funnier than any of them. OK began as a joke about bad spelling.
A fad for silly abbreviations
In the late 1830s, young newspapermen in Boston and New York fell into a craze for comic abbreviations. The joke had two layers: you shortened a phrase to its initials, and you misspelled the phrase first. N.S. stood for “nuff said.” K.G. stood for “know go,” meaning no go. O.W. was “oll wright.”
It was, more or less, the internet slang of 1839, printed on paper. Like most such fads it was disposable, and nearly all of it is now dead and forgotten.
The joke that survived
On 23 March 1839, the Boston Morning Post ran a small humorous item, and in it the editor Charles Gordon Greene printed o.k., helpfully glossed as “all correct.” The spelling being joked about was oll korrect.
That should have been the end of it. The word had no more future than oll wright. What saved it was an accident of politics.
Old Kinderhook gets elected, sort of
In 1840 President Martin Van Buren ran for re-election. He came from Kinderhook, New York, and his nickname was Old Kinderhook. His supporters in New York founded the O.K. Club, and suddenly the dying little joke had a national campaign shouting its initials in the street.
Van Buren lost the election. OK won it. The word came out of 1840 attached to something people had chanted, and it never left the language again.
Then the telegraph got hold of it
The last piece of luck was technological. OK is short, distinctive, and hard to confuse with anything else, which made it perfect for a machine that charged by the character. Telegraph operators used it to confirm that a message had arrived intact, railroads used it to sign off on orders, and a word that meant “all correct” became the standard way to say so on the wire.
From there it went everywhere, helped by the fact that it is easy to say in almost any language. It is one of the few words the world genuinely did get from America, unlike soccer, which only sounds as though it did.
The graveyard of better stories
A word this big feels like it deserves a grander birth, so people kept inventing one. OK has been confidently traced to the Choctaw okeh, to Greek ola kala, to French au quai, to German ohne Korrektur, to Scottish och aye, and to a railway clerk named Obadiah Kelly who supposedly initialed the paperwork. President Woodrow Wilson believed the Choctaw version so firmly that he spelled it okeh.
They are all better stories than the truth, which is exactly why they should have been doubted. It took a Columbia professor, Allen Walker Read, digging through newspaper archives in the 1960s, to prove the Boston joke was the real thing. His work is a small monument to the difference between a good story and a true one.
So the most successful word in the language is a misspelling of a phrase nobody would misspell, kept alive by a president who lost. There is no grand origin. That is the grand origin.
The Monthly Lemma is built on stories like this: one everyday word a month, traced back to where it really came from, printed and posted to your door. One word, and the whole world behind it.
A word like this, every month
This is the sort of story in every issue of The Monthly Lemma, printed and posted to your door. A quietly perfect gift for anyone who loves words.