Origins of "OK"

This little American phrase has gone global in a huge way. People that can't speak English know how to say OK. More people across the globe commonly know how to say OK than just about any other thing, with the only likely exception being that internationally consistent, Judeo-Christian praise word, hallelujah, which means "Praise to Yahweh!" or "Praise you, Jah!" (Yahweh is the best guess of many scholars on how to pronounce the Old Testament name of God, which is often misspelled and mispronounced as Jehovah. More on that in a later post, perhaps.)

Opinions abound on how it started, but clearly it's indigenous to the USA. To cut to the chase: The O and K are initials, but not a lady's. Some historians say they were originally used as a way to deliberately misspell the initials of "all correct" (which ought to be A.C.). But many historians agree on a known connection that is believed to be the major reason that the little saying outlasted all the other odd abbreviations of the time:

The letters stand for "Old Kinderhook", which was a nickname of Martin Van Buren, the eighth President of the United States.

According to the aforelinked Wiki article: "Martin Van Buren was born in the village of Kinderhook, New York, approximately 25 miles south of Albany, the state capital, as the third of five children." And he, "was educated at common schools and at Kinderhook Academy."

According to an interesting article on NPR's site:

So if OK stands for "all correct," wouldn't it be "AC"? Not exactly, says linguist Erin McKean, who points out that the word was intentionally misspelled. Much like the way people on the Internet shorten or abbreviate words when typing, OK was misspelled on purpose.

"For instance, a lot of kids online spell "cool," "k-e-w-l," says McKean, senior editor for U.S. dictionaries at Oxford Press. "They know how to spell cool, but it just looks cooler to spell it "k-e-w-l."

It was cool in certain East Coast cities in the mid-19th century to substitute OK for "all correct." McKean says it was common for people of that day to use inside lingo -- shorthand full of puns, purposeful misspellings and abbreviations. For example, they'd use "SP" for "small potatoes," or "TBFTB" for "too big for their britches."

Other abbreviations faded into obscurity, but the word OK stuck around. One of the reasons it weathered time is because it got a boost from then-president Martin Van Buren.

Van Buren, a native of Kinderhook, N.Y., was popularly referred to as "Old Kinderhook" -- OK for short. Van Buren's 1840 reelection campaign became so heated that the word OK was widely used and abused by both sides.

In fact, to hurt the Democratic Party, an opponent started a rumor that it was former president Andrew Jackson who created OK, as an abbreviation of "all correct." The rumor implied that the rustic Jackson was a poor speller. That explanation for OK wasn't true, either, but it did have staying power. And it helped propel the use of OK even further.

So much, in fact, that it's used all around the world today.