Where Does OK Come From? The 1839 Newspaper Joke Behind the Word
OK first appeared in a Boston newspaper in 1839 as an abbreviation of "oll korrect," a deliberate misspelling of "all correct." Scholar Allen Walker Read traced it and dismantled the rival theories.
OK stands for "oll korrect," a jokey misspelling of "all correct." It first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post on March 23, 1839, during a newspaper fad for abbreviating deliberately misspelled phrases. Columbia University scholar Allen Walker Read traced that origin in the 1960s, and the 1840 presidential campaign helped spread the word.
So one of the most widely used words on the planet began as an inside joke among newspaper editors. Getting from that joke to global use took a presidential election, and getting from global use back to the true origin took more than a century of guesswork.
What was the "oll korrect" joke?
In the late 1830s, newspapers in Boston and New York were having fun with a peculiar trend. Humorists misspelled everyday phrases on purpose and then shrank them to initials, like a code for readers in the know. Merriam-Webster gives examples from the period:
- "K.G." for "know go," a misspelling of "no go";
- "O.W." for "oll wright," a misspelling of "all right";
- "O.K." for "oll korrect," a misspelling of "all correct";
- "O.K.K.B.W.P.," which a New York paper explained in 1839 as "one kind kiss before we part."
The earliest known OK appears in a satirical piece by Charles Gordon Greene, editor of the Boston Morning Post, poking fun at the Providence Journal in neighboring Rhode Island. Greene jokingly suggested his rival should make things "o.k." ("all correct"). Merriam-Webster dates the first known use of OK as an adjective and adverb to 1839.
How did OK outlive the fad?
Most of those abbreviations vanished as quickly as they appeared. OK got lucky. In 1840, President Martin Van Buren was running for reelection, and his nickname was "Old Kinderhook," after his hometown of Kinderhook, New York. The initials matched. His supporters formed "OK Clubs" and rallied around the slogan "Vote for OK."
Van Buren lost, but the word won. The campaign carried the two letters far beyond Boston's newspaper readers, and over time OK stopped being a joke and became ordinary vocabulary. Merriam-Webster records OK as a noun from 1841 and as a verb ("to OK something") from 1882.
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1839 | The Boston Morning Post prints "o.k." for "oll korrect" |
| 1840 | Supporters of Van Buren, "Old Kinderhook," form OK Clubs |
| 1841 | First recorded use of OK as a noun |
| 1882 | First recorded use of OK as a verb |
| 1960s | Allen Walker Read publishes the research that documents the origin |
Who figured out where OK came from?
For more than a century, almost nobody remembered the Boston joke. The trail was recovered by Allen Walker Read, a scholar at Columbia University who, according to Smithsonian Magazine, combed through old newspapers in the 1960s until he found the 1839 citation and made sense of the abbreviation craze. His work later became the basis of linguist Allan Metcalf's 2010 book "OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word."
Read did more than pin down a date. He also showed, one by one, why the more famous explanations didn't hold up. Since then, major English dictionaries have given "oll korrect" as the origin of the word.
What about the other theories?
There have been plenty. Merriam-Webster notes that people have proposed Latin, Greek, Scottish, French, Finnish and West African sources such as Wolof and Mandingo. A few of the best known:
- Choctaw "okeh": proposed in 1885, it claimed Andrew Jackson picked the word up from the Choctaw people. Even Woodrow Wilson believed it. There is no record of OK in this sense before 1839.
- "Old Kinderhook": Van Buren's nickname helped popularize OK, but it only entered the picture in 1840, a year after the Boston joke.
- Civil War biscuits: according to Smithsonian, Read dismantled the idea that OK came from a brand of crackers supplied to troops. The war started more than 20 years after 1839.
- The Haitian port of Aux Cayes, the German "Oberst Kommandant" and the telegraph term "open key": they show up in trivia lists, but none comes with earlier evidence that explains the Boston usage.
Etymologists apply a simple test: the winning explanation is the one with a written record in the right place at the right time. A good story without documents stays a legend, much like the tale of the earl who supposedly named the sandwich. Not everyone agreed: in 1975, Frank Greco suggested OK might have several origins, including the Scots "och aye." The idea didn't change the consensus.
Why did such a small word travel so far?
OK is short, easy to pronounce in many languages and useful for almost anything: agreeing, confirming, rating something as acceptable. In English it competes with "all right," "sure" and "fine," and it is spelled both "OK" and "okay." Other everyday words have surprising backstories too, including the hello we use to answer the phone.
The word that now approves payments, wraps up conversations and signs off on plans still carries a trace of its birth: two letters that only make sense because someone in 1839 decided to spell "correct" with a K.
