OK: How a 19th-Century Joke Became the World’s Most Used Word

“OK” is understood almost everywhere on Earth. It began as a newspaper joke in Boston in 1839.

A fashion for silly abbreviations

In the late 1830s, young writers in Boston and New York enjoyed a craze for abbreviating deliberately misspelled phrases: “K.Y.” for “know yuse” (no use), “O.W.” for “oll wright”. In March 1839 the Boston Morning Post printed “o.k.” with the explanation “all correct” — spelled jokingly as “oll korrect”.

Saved by an election

Most of those abbreviations vanished. OK survived thanks to the 1840 US presidential election: President Martin Van Buren was nicknamed “Old Kinderhook” after his home town, and his supporters formed “O.K. Clubs”. The slogan put the letters in front of millions of people.

The telegraph sealed it

Short, distinct and easy to tap out, “OK” became a natural acknowledgement for telegraph operators — and from there spread around the world, into radio, aviation and eventually every chat app.

Who worked this out?

The origin was traced by the American language scholar Allen Walker Read in the 1960s, who searched old newspapers and disproved many popular stories (that it came from Choctaw, Greek, or a German general).

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