Where does the word 'OK' come from?
Playful misspelled abbreviations were fashionable in newspapers.
The standard account comes from Columbia University scholar Allen Walker Read, who traced the word through old newspapers in the 1960s. He found its first known printed appearance on 23 March 1839 in the Boston Morning Post, edited by Charles Gordon Greene, who used 'o.k.' to mean 'oll korrect' (all correct) in a jab at a rival paper, the Providence Journal.
The joke made sense because of a fad. In the late 1830s, newspapers in Boston and nearby cities enjoyed abbreviating deliberately misspelled phrases, such as 'SP' for 'small potatoes'. Most of those coinages vanished. 'OK' survived thanks to the 1840 presidential campaign, when supporters of Martin Van Buren, nicknamed 'Old Kinderhook' after his home town in New York, formed 'OK Clubs'. The slogan spread the abbreviation nationwide, even though Van Buren lost the election.
Many other origin stories circulate and Read disposed of them one by one. They include a Choctaw word 'okeh', a Haitian port called Aux Cayes, a telegraph code, and Civil War biscuits (the war began after the 1839 print date, so the last cannot be right). A later proposal, from Frank Greco in 1975, suggested that other expressions, such as Scots 'och aye', may have reinforced the word's spread, but Read's account is still the most widely accepted.