#1456 Where did the word “OK” come from?

Where did the word “OK” come from? There are different theories about where “OK” came from, but it appears to have started in Boston in the 1830s, thanks to a fashion there for incorrectly abbreviating words for humorous intent.

OK is probably the only word in any language that is truly universal. There are probably very few languages that don’t use it. The languages that do use it might have their own pronunciation for it, but the word is still OK. So, where did it come from and how did it spread around the world?

OK is sometimes written as O.K. and sometimes written as okay. Which is correct? Well, technically, they all are, although OK is the most common spelling these days. The word started as O.K., then became okay in 1929, and then it naturally just became OK without the periods.

A lot of countries use OK, and a lot of countries think that it started with them. It may have done so, but the most popular origin story for OK is that it started in 1839 in Boston, New England, USA. The local newspaper, the Boston Morning Post, was edited by Charles Gordon Greene. There was a literary fashion at the time for using abbreviations, and often abbreviations of purposefully misspelled words. Greene liked the style and he used it in his articles. He used S.P. for Small Potatoes, OW for All Wight (all right), WOOOFC for With One Of Our First Citizens, and K.G. for Know Go (no go). No one really knows why, other than he thought it was amusing. The paper did not have a huge distribution, and his abbreviations did not catch on. In fact, he did not expect them to catch on. With, of course, the exception of O.K., Charles Greene used O.K. as an abbreviation for Oll Korrect (all correct). He had no way of knowing where that word would go, but it needed another benefactor before it could go nationwide and then worldwide. Greene used O.K. on March 23, 1839. He was writing a satirical piece on the editorial practices of a rival paper. There are another couple of instances of O.K. being used to mean oll korrect in some other newspapers, but it was the following year, 1840, when it took off.

In the 1840 US elections, the incumbent president, Martin Van Buren, was running against William Henry Harrison. Spoiler alert: Van Buren lost and William Henry Harrison became the 9^th president of the US, for one term only. During the election, Martin Van Buren’s supporters called him Old Kinderhook because he came from the town of Kinderhook in New York. They came up with the slogan, “Vote of OK!” William Henry Harrison’s supporters seized on this and started using the Oll Korrect version of OK to imply that Van Buren was not OK. As it turned out, the voters believed them. However, seeing OK everywhere during the election stamped it into the American public consciousness.

From there, the word OK started to spread with the newly growing telegraph lines. Telegraph operators communicated in Morse code, and it was always easier to say shorter words than longer words. OK is only two letters, and it can be used in an enormous number of situations. And once they started to use OK, it continued to spread. Within ten years of its introduction, there are examples of people writing OK to sign documents, and it is used in literature. US President Woodrow Wilson believed it had come from the Choctaw Native American language, and he spelled it “okeh”, meaning “it is so”. He wrote OK on documents as well.

Once OK was grounded in American English, it had to make the journey to other countries. This was not such a leap of the imagination because US soldiers have been stationed in many countries around the world over the last century. The First World War and the Second World War were both opportunities for American English to spread, and a word like OK was easy to remember, easy to pronounce, and extremely useful. It found its way into many other languages. Some countries, such as France, have tried to ban the word OK in favor of a French word, but they have never succeeded.

If OK had appeared in another language, it might not have spread so far. If it had used more than two letters, it might not have spread so far. And if it had not had quite so many usages, it might not have spread so far. And this is what I learned today.

Sources

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-one-man-discovered-the-obscure-origins-of-the-word-ok-180953258

https://www.npr.org/2025/07/23/nx-s1-5463788/ok-origin-martin-van-buren

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-12503686