Where does the word "OK" come from?

OK most likely comes from a joke: it is short for 'oll korrect', a deliberately bad spelling of 'all correct' that circulated in Boston newspapers in the late 1830s. Most modern dictionaries accept this origin, first worked out by the linguist Allen Walker Read in the 1960s.

The joke makes sense in context. In 1838, Boston writers had a craze for abbreviations, like NG for 'no go' or GT for 'gone to Texas', and for comic misspellings. One of OK's cousins was OW, 'oll wright'. Read tracked down the earliest printed OK in the Boston Morning Post of 23 March 1839, where the writer helpfully explained it: 'o.k.—all correct'.

Most of those abbreviations vanished. OK survived thanks to politics. In the 1840 presidential election, supporters of President Martin Van Buren, nicknamed 'Old Kinderhook' after his hometown, claimed OK stood for him, while his opponents mocked it as the bad spelling of his predecessor, Andrew Jackson. The quarrel spread the word across the country.

Other origin stories exist. American dictionaries long favoured the Choctaw word 'okeh', meaning 'it is so', and many popular tales, such as a French 'Au quai !' shouted on Louisiana docks, have no documentary support. Today OK may be the most spoken or written word on Earth.