The origin of “OK”
by Jonathan Clark on January 8, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Richard Lederer reports on Allen Walker Read, who died in 2002 at 96. Read enjoyed tracing words to their original sources, identifying “Dixie” from an 1850 minstrel show, tracing “Podunk” to an Indian name meaning “swamp,” and “almighty dollar” to author Washington Irving. He’s best known for hunting down the origin of “OK,” a word universal in communication almost everywhere in the world today.
In the 1830s, language went through a craze for initialisms, much like today! The fad actually generated letter combinations of intentionally wrong misspellings. In this craze, “KG” stood for “know go,” “NSMJ” for “’nough said ‘mong gentlemen,” and so forth.
In this strange alphabetical language, “OW” stood for “oll wright.” It wasn’t much of a stretch from that to “OK” for “oll korrect.” You know the rest of the story, as Paul Harvey might say. The other initialisms disappeared quickly; but Presidential candidate Martin Van Buren’s people co-opted “OK”: for the 1840 campaign, based on his nickname, “Old Kinderhook.” Van Buren lost. People of almost every language use and understand “OK” today!
Webster’s New World Dictionary of american English (3rd Ed.) says: ” OK or O.K. adj., adv., interj. [orig. U.S. colloq: first known use (March 23, 1838) by C. G. Greene, editor, in the Boston Morning Post, as if abbrev. for “oll korrect,” facetious misspelling of all correct; altered < Scot dial. och aye, ah yes, oh yes