What does OK actually stand for?

It is probably the most successful word ever invented. People say it in Tokyo, Lagos, Berlin and Buenos Aires. Yet it started life as a weak newspaper pun about bad spelling, cooked up by bored Boston editors.

The short answer

OK is short for oll korrect, a comic misspelling of all correct. Its first known appearance in print is the Boston Morning Post of 23 March 1839, in a playful article edited by Charles Gordon Greene.

The real story

In the summer of 1838, Boston newspapers caught a strange fever: abbreviating phrases into initials, often with silly misspellings added for extra laughs. It was the 1830s equivalent of internet slang. Most of these jokes died quickly. One did not.

The Morning Post article that launched OK was a tongue-in-cheek piece involving a rival paper, the Providence Journal, and a group called the Anti-Bell Ringing Society, which campaigned against a law about ringing dinner bells. Tucked inside was o.k., glossed as all correct, with the joke being that neither letter is actually right.

Then came the twist that saved it. In the 1840 US presidential election, supporters of Martin Van Buren, whose nickname was Old Kinderhook after his home town in New York, adopted OK as a slogan and formed OK Clubs. The double meaning spread the word across the country. Van Buren still lost, but his slogan won, spectacularly.

The detective who untangled all this was Allen Walker Read, a Columbia University scholar, who published his findings in the journal American Speech in 1963. He combed through old newspapers, traced the abbreviation craze, and found the 1839 citation.

Why people get it wrong

Because OK is everywhere and its real origin is so silly, people have long hunted for a grander source. Theories that Read examined and rejected include a Choctaw word, okeh, supposedly popularised by Andrew Jackson; a French port in Haiti; a telegraph code; a German military rank; and a brand of Civil War biscuits. Others have pointed to Scots och aye, Greek ola kala and French aux quais stamped on cotton bales.

The Old Kinderhook story is the sneakiest myth, because it is half true. Van Buren’s campaign really did make OK famous, but the word was already in print the year before. The campaign was the amplifier, not the source.

Arguments have not completely stopped. Even in 1840, a newspaper noted that the two letters had been given all sorts of meanings, including Out of Kash. But Read’s printed evidence is the strongest trail anyone has found, and it leads straight back to a pun about spelling.

“So the most popular word on Earth is a spelling mistake. On purpose. From 1839. That’s about as OK as it gets.”