The Origin of OK: A Boston Joke That Ate the World

The little word that swallowed the world

OK is often called the most successful of all American exports — more travelled than jazz, blue jeans or Coca-Cola. It has been carried into languages that share nothing else with English, pronounced by people who could not name a single American city, and pressed into service as noun, verb, adjective, interjection and the universal grunt of assent. A word doing that much work invites myth, and OK has attracted more origin stories than almost any expression in the language. It has been traced to a Choctaw affirmative, to a Wolof or Mandingo word carried on the slave ships, to the French au quai shouted at the dockside, to a Finnish oikea, to the initials of a biscuit-maker named Orrin Kendall, and to a railway freight clerk called Obadiah Kelly. Every one of these is false. The truth is both humbler and funnier.

A newspaperman’s laboured pun

OK was born as a joke on 23 March 1839, in the columns of the Boston Morning Post. Its editor, Charles Gordon Greene, was needling a rival paper in the mock-portentous style of the day, reporting on the doings of an imaginary body he called the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society. In the middle of the paragraph he abbreviated “all correct” — but he abbreviated it wrongly on purpose, spelling it “oll korrect” and then reducing that to two letters:

…he of the Journal, and his train-band, would have the “contribution box,” et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.

To the modern eye this is baffling; you have to understand the fashion it belonged to. In the late 1830s the young, literate men of Boston were in the grip of a craze for comic abbreviation. The trick was to take a phrase, misspell it in a jokey phonetic way, and then reduce it to initials, so that only the initiated understood. “All right” became O.W. (“oll wright”); “no go” became K.G. (“know go”); “no use” became K.Y. (“know yuse”). Most of these are forgotten, because they deserved to be. OK is the sole survivor of a whole vanished dialect of in-jokes, and Greene’s little squib is its birth certificate.

Old Kinderhook to the rescue

A private joke does not become a world language on its own. What lifted OK out of the newspaper columns and onto the street was the presidential election of 1840. The incumbent, Martin Van Buren, had been born in the village of Kinderhook, in the Hudson Valley of New York, and his supporters had long called him “Old Kinderhook.” In the spring of 1840 New York Democrats founded a partisan club to campaign for his re-election and named it — with a wink at the abbreviation already circulating — the O.K. Club. Now the two letters had a second, flattering reading. To be OK was to be “all correct,” and it was also to be for Old Kinderhook. The slogan rolled through the campaign, chanted, printed and posted, and it fixed the little word in the national ear.

The Whig opposition, sensing the letters’ usefulness, tried to turn them against Van Buren. They spread a rival story that OK was not a Democratic coinage at all but a monument to the ignorance of the previous Democratic hero, Andrew Jackson, who was said to have scrawled it on documents in the mistaken belief that “all correct” began that way. This was propaganda, not etymology, but it did OK a backhanded favour: it kept the letters in the newspapers through a bitter campaign. Van Buren lost the election to William Henry Harrison. The word he had adopted won in a landslide and has been winning ever since.

The theories that had to be cleared away

To appreciate Read’s achievement you have to see how crowded the field was. By the middle of the twentieth century the origin of OK had become a kind of playground for amateur etymologists, and the rival accounts were repeated in respectable places. One school held that OK came from the Choctaw particle okeh, meaning “it is so”; this theory had a distinguished champion in President Woodrow Wilson, who is said to have spelled the word “okeh” on official papers in the belief that he was restoring its true Native American form. Another traced it to West African languages carried to the Americas by enslaved people — Wolof or Mandingo words of assent that, the argument ran, entered American English through the plantations. Others pointed to the French au quai (“to the quay”), supposedly stamped on cotton bales or shouted at cargo; to the Greek ola kala (“all good”); to a Finnish word; to Scottish dialect; and to a whole gallery of individuals — a freight agent, a telegrapher, a biscuit manufacturer — whose initials happened to be O and K.

The appeal of these stories is easy to understand. Each gives OK a dignified pedigree, an origin in some real language or real person rather than in a throwaway joke. But every one of them founders on the same rock. Read searched for printed evidence of OK earlier than the 1839 Morning Post paragraph, in any of these supposed sources, and found none. The Choctaw okeh is real, but there is no chain of documents carrying it into English before 1839; the same is true of the African and French candidates. A resemblance in sound, however striking, is not a lineage. Without an unbroken trail of dated evidence it is only a coincidence dressed up as a fact — and coincidences of sound are cheap, because the possible syllables are few and the world’s languages are many.

The detective who settled it

For more than a century the tangle of rival claims went unresolved, and the confident false stories multiplied. It took a patient and slightly obsessive scholar to cut through them. Allen Walker Read, a linguist at Columbia University, spent years chasing OK through newspaper morgues and library stacks, and in a celebrated series of articles in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964 he laid out the case. He found the 1839 Morning Post printing; he documented the abbreviation fad that gave it its shape; he traced the Old Kinderhook boost of 1840; and he then went through the competing origin myths and demolished each in turn, showing that not one of them could produce a printed example earlier than Greene’s joke.

Read’s work is a model of how etymology is actually done. It is not a matter of finding a plausible foreign word that sounds similar — by that method almost any word can be “traced” anywhere — but of finding the earliest datable evidence and following the trail forward. The Choctaw and West African stories, appealing as they are, share a fatal weakness: no one advancing them has ever produced an English text using OK before 1839. The Boston joke can be dated to the day.

Why this one survived

It is worth asking why OK, alone among the jokey abbreviations of 1839, is still with us. Part of the answer is the accident of the 1840 campaign, which gave it a second life and a national stage. But part is the shape of the word itself. OK is short, it is easy to say, and its two vowels carry across a noisy room or a crackling telephone line. It fills a genuine gap in the language: English had no neutral, all-purpose token of acknowledgement that committed the speaker to neither warmth nor enthusiasm. You can say OK to agree, to submit, to change the subject, or simply to signal that you have heard. The telegraph adopted it early as a confirmation of receipt, and later so did radio operators, computer programmers and the designers of the dialog box, whose OK button most of us press dozens of times a day without a thought.

The full form okay — respelling the letters as a proper word — came later, once the abbreviation was too well established for anyone to remember it had ever been a joke. And that is the final irony of the story. A pun so laboured that it needed a footnote in 1839, understood by a handful of Boston clubmen, has become the plainest word in the language: the thing we say when there is nothing else to say. Its origin is not lost in the mists of antiquity. It is a Tuesday in March, a rival editor being teased, and a spelling deliberately got wrong.