The word ‘OK’, or ‘okay’ which is my usual spelling, might feel fairly modern. And while it certainly isn’t as old as some, it’s no spring chicken either – it’s around 180 years old. It’s understood in most languages, and even has its own (possibly racist) hand gesture. But where did it come from?
To find out, we’re going to travel back to 1839.
Time for some LOLs
You might think that txt-spk abbreviations like YOLO and FOMO are a modern invention. But cool cats in the 19th century were all over that shizzle – with a twist. These crazy kids deliberately misspelled words before they abbreviated them. Like ‘KG’, which stood for ‘know go’, a misspelling of ‘no go’. Hilarious, right? Well, no, but they didn’t have Netflix, so let’s forgive them.
Anyhoo, on 23 March 1839, the abbreviation ‘o.k.’ appeared in an article in the American newspaper, the Boston Morning Post. It was a shortening of ‘oll korrect’ a ‘humorous’ misspelling of ‘all correct’ as part of a piss-take of another newspaper by the Post’s editor Charles Gordon Greene. OK appeared again in the Boston Post a few days later, and it wasn’t long before it began to slip into the vernacular.
But it really took off a few months later thanks to a presidential campaign.
Making America OK again
This might be a white supremacist’s hand, sorry
The then-current US president was Martin Van Buren who was running against William Henry Harrison (seems everyone had three names in 1800s Murica). Harrison had some apparently kick-ass campaign slogans, although I confess they mean nothing to me – ‘Tippecanoe and Tyler Too’ and ‘Log Cabin and Hard Cider’, for example (WHAT). Van Buren’s supporters decided to use ‘OK’ as theirs. This was based on the fact that Van Buren was from the upstate New York town of Kinderhook, and so was nicknamed ‘Old Kinderhook’. And thanks to that article in the Boston Post it now had the double-meaning of oll korrect too. I can imagine them all slapping themselves on the backs at the campaign headquarters after coming up with that.
Despite their cleverness, OK didn’t prove a good enough campaign slogan and Harrison’s hard cider was the winner. Sadly he didn’t have long to celebrate though. He has the dubious honour of the shortest presidency in United States history – even less than Liz Truss – at 31 days. He did die though, which is a much better excuse than Truss. The same wasn’t true of OK which refused to go away, becoming firmly ensconced in everyday speech.
I should probably say that the above is the most widely accepted theory for the origin of OK. There are several others, including that it’s:
a derivative of the German ‘ohne Korrektur’ (‘without correction’)
from the Scots ‘och aye’
from the Wolof (a national language of Senegal) ‘waw-kay’
from an army biscuit called ‘Orrin Kendall’
from a native American Choctaw chief called Old Keokuk.
And what about the spelling? Well, it’s really up to you. ‘OK’ in all caps with no full stops is the most common, followed by my favourite ‘okay’ which developed some time later. The all-lower-case ‘ok’ is also acceptable, although it’s not as popular as the other two. But considering the word itself comes from a misspelling, maybe it’s not worth getting too het up over.