How OK began as a joke in a Boston newspaper
In the late 1830s, young newspaper editors in Boston and New York shared a running joke: abbreviations of deliberate misspellings. OW stood for 'oll wright' and NS for 'nuff said'. Almost all of them disappeared within a few years.
On 23 March 1839 the Boston Morning Post printed 'o.k.' in a humorous piece, glossed as 'all correct'. The joke was that neither letter was right: the abbreviation stood for 'oll korrect'.
OK would probably have faded with the rest if not for the presidential election of 1840. Martin Van Buren came from Kinderhook, New York, and his supporters called him Old Kinderhook. They formed OK Clubs and used the letters as a slogan, which put them in newspapers across the country.
After that, OK turned out to be useful in a way the other jokes weren't. It was short and hard to mishear, which suited telegraph operators and, later, radio. By the twentieth century it had travelled into dozens of languages, often unchanged.
For a long time its origin was argued over, with stories pointing to Choctaw, Scots or German. The newspaper trail was traced in the 1960s by the linguist Allen Walker Read, and his account is the one most scholars accept today.
What did OK originally stand for?
OK started in 1839 as a newspaper joke for 'oll korrect', and a presidential campaign a year later carried it across America.
