A Matthew Brady photograph of U.S. President Martin Van Buren, c.1856. While not the word’s origin, Van Buren’s nickname of Old Kinderhook played a significant role in popularizing OK.
22 June 2021
OK or Okay is the most successful of all Americanisms. It has invaded hundreds of other languages and been adopted by them as a word. It was even one of the first words spoken from the surface of the moon. Despite the term’s success, however, for years no one was really sure where the word came from. The origin of OK became the Holy Grail of etymology. Finally, in 1963 the Percival (or Galahad) of our story, Dr. Allen Walker Read of Columbia University uncovered the origin.
Read solved the mystery in a series of articles in the journal American Speech in 1963-64. OK was the result of two editorial fads common in newspapers of the era: a penchant for fanciful initialisms and deliberate misspellings in order to take on the persona of a country bumpkin. Read discovered that OK is a facetious misspelling for all correct (oll korrect) that appeared in Boston newspapers starting in 1839, part of a fad for such initialisms that had started the previous year. One of the most prolific users of these initialisms, and the first to use OK, was Charles Gordon Greene, founder and editor of the Boston Morning Post.
The nineteenth-century penchant for initialisms can be seen in this passage from the Boston Morning Post of 12 June 1838:
Melancholy.—We understand that J. Eliot Brown, Esq., Secretary of the Boston Young Men’s Society for Meliorating the Condition of the Indians, F.A.H. (fell at Hoboken, N.Y.) on Saturday last at 4 o’clock, P.M. in a duel W.O.O.O.F.C. (with one of our first citizens.) What measures will be taken by the Society in consequence of this heart rending event, R.T.B.S. (remains to be seen.)
The second fad, deliberate misspellings, was not limited to newspapers. For example, the writings of Artemus Ward (pseudonym of Charles Farrar Browne) and Josh Billings (pseudonym of Henry Wheeler Shaw) were enormously popular pieces produced in the style of a country bumpkin who could not spell correctly. The confluence of these two fads was recognized by the New York Evening Tattler of 27 July 1839:
THE INITIAL LANGUAGE.—This is a species of spoken short-hand, which is getting into very general use among loafers and gentlemen of the fancy, besides Editors, to whom it saves, by its comprehensive expressiveness, much trouble in writing and many "ems" in printing. The Boston Morning Post made great use of it at one period. It is known that the City of the Pilgrims is an extremely aristocratic place, and that "our first men" are referred to constantly. Charley Green [sic] of the Post always wrote O.F.M. Walter of the Boston Transcript, we believe, used to designate the Young Men's Society for the Amelioration Condition of the Indians—Y.M.S.A.C.I. We heard yesterday of a lady who said to a gentleman, who was about to take leave of her, "O.K.K.B.W.P." The gallant thought and obligingly granted the fair one's request. What could she have meant but Kiss Before We Part?"
It will be observed that in the above, those initials are used which, in the vulgar spelling, begin the words they are intended to signify. But this language is more original, richer and less comprehensible, when those initials are given which might possibly, some how or other, be employed by people who spell "on their own hook." For instance, "K.G." (no go) K.Y. (no use) and K.K.K. (commit no nuisance.) The last would be highly useful at this time to those housekeepers who throw filth into the streets. Apropos to this is the toast given by a country schoolmaster. "The Three Rs-Reading, 'Riting and 'Rithmetic!”
OK was not the first such initialism to carry the sense of everything is correct or right. It was preceded by O.W. (oll wright) in the Boston Morning Post of 7 February 1839:
The N.E. Non-Resistance Society, have published the number of a paper, which is called “The Non-Resistant”—it will be issued semi-monthly. We observe the names of several ladies among its officers. We wonder to what extent they adhere to the principles of the society? Wm. L. Garrison—Miss Martineau’s Moses—is Corresponding Secretary, yet he is a must furious “resistant” to various things. However, we suppose it is O.W. (all right).
And OK made its first appearance in that paper about seven weeks later, on 23 March 1839. A.B.R.S. stands for Anti-Bell-Ringing Society, presumably a fictional organization:
Quite an excitement was caused here yesterday, by an announcement in the Boston Post, that a deputation from the Boston A.B.R.S. would pass through the city, on their way to N. York. Nothing but the short notice prevented the Marine Artillery from turning out to do honor to the occasion. The report proved unfounded, however, and has led to the opinion here that the Post is not the organ of that illustrious body.
The above is from the Providence Journal, the editor of which is a little too quick on the trigger, on this occasion. We said not a word about our deputation passing “through the city” of Providence.—We said our brethren were going to New York in the Richmond, and they did go, as per Post of Thursday. The “Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Bells,” is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his troin-band, would have the “contribution box,” et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.
And there was this on 10 April 1839:
A new tie-up for Bostonians.—Mr Michael Hughes, better known here by his well earned office of “Magnificent Punch Distiller for the A.B.R.S,” has opened a new hotel in New York, 6 Rosevelt [sic] street, near Pearl and Chatham, under the name of the “New England House.” It is hardly necessary to say to those who know Mr Hughes, that his establishment will be found to be “A. No. One”—that is, O.K.—all correct.
And there is this pleonastic use from 18 December 1839, which shows that by this stage Greene was thinking of OK as a single lexical unit, rather than a phrase (like saying ATM machine or PIN number today):
“Confucious [sic] Roundhead’s” communications are all “O.K.,” and will appear in short time. We are always pleased to hear from him.
By the fall of 1839, other Boston newspapers were using OK, and the word had spread to New York. There is this item from the from the Boston Evening Transcript of 11 October 1839 that was reprinted in the New York Commercial Advertiser and the New York Spectator in the days following:
A Good Omen. So little excitement has been created here by the suspension of the U.S. Bank and its dependencies, that our Bank Directors have not thought it worth their while to call a meeting, even for consultation, on the subject. It is O.K. (all correct) in this quarter.
And by early 1840, OK had made its way as far south as Baltimore. From the Sun of 24 February 1840:
On Saturday we received from the “Pratt Street Green House,” a large, fresh looking julep, having all the appearance of one made in July. We have no doubt it is equally as good as it looks, but as we have no tube through which to taste the “beverage,” and not liking to put our nose so close to the ice at this season of the year, we bottled it up and forwarded it to the editor of the New Orleans Sun, who is competent to judge of its merits, and as soon as we hear from him we will advise the landlord of Jim’s opinion. We owed the Sun man a julep, which we lost in a bet about five years ago, and he has been bothering us about it ever since. We hope this will satisfy him, and that he will give us an acknowledgement that it is o.k. (all correct.)
But in the summer and fall of 1840, use of OK exploded. Democratic President Martin Van Buren, who was running for re-election that year had the nickname of Old Kinderhook, as he was from Kinderhook, New York. And the initialism that had started in Boston newspapers collided with the presidential campaign. Van Buren’s party formed the Democratic O.K. Club, and not to be outdone, the competing Whigs also began to use OK, promulgating (and perhaps starting?) the legend that OK was coined by former Democratic President Andrew Jackson because he was illiterate and couldn’t spell all correct properly. As a result, OK achieved national recognition and use. (The Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, won the election, but died thirty-one days, exactly one month, after his inauguration—the shortest presidency in history—so, really the only winner in the contest was OK.)
OK had crossed the Atlantic by the 1860s. It appears as an entry in Hotten’s 1864 Slang Dictionary, although he might have been referring to American usage. Hotten included some American slang in his dictionary, although he doesn’t label this entry as such:
O.K., a matter to be O.K., (OLL korrect, i.e., all correct,) must be on the “square,” and all things done in order.
But we have a clear instance of a use from Ireland on 28 July 1866 that was reprinted in the journal Notes and Queries:
“VALENTIA, July 27.—The following telegram has been received from Mr. R.A. Glass, Managing Director of the Telegraph Construction and Maintenance Company (Limited):—‘O.K.,’ (all correct).”—Saunders’s News Letter, July 28th, 1866.
And OK had made it as far as India by 1883. From a piece on how British officials and officers entertained themselves that was printed in the Graphic of 17 March 1883:
But it was extraordinary how people could dance on such heavy, heady stuff, and how they could move at all after the prodigious “sit down” supper of the era. The “sit down” supper, in distinction with the “stand up” supper was once upon a time a grand Indian institution. It was voted O.K. or all correct, whereas the other was pronounced only a one-horse affair. The great object was to have substantial fare for the company, such as mulligatawny soup, spiced rounds of beef, buffalo humps, and things it might be supposed no votary of Terpsichore would care to look at in such a climate. Nevertheless, the solid fare disappeared, with the beer, like winking.
OK not only spread throughout the English-speaking world, it also spread through the parts of speech. Elbridge Gerry Paige, under the pseudonym Dow, Jr., used OK as a noun in a patent sermon he wrote. Paige was a newspaperman who wrote sermons for sale as a side business. This one appears in his Short Patent Sermons of 1841:
[Fortitude] brings refreshing draughts to the lips of the weary wanderer over the burning sands of Africa—infuses new life into his soul, while Hope adds an O.K. to his condition.
And it is recorded as a verb in testimony from 19 April 1881 that was presented to the U.S. Congress in hearings about a contested election:
Q. How many cards were handed to you?—A. Well, I couldn't tell you. I never kept track of them.
Q. Do you know how many hundred?—A. I couldn't say.
Q. You found a great many O.K.?—A. Yes, sir; I found a good many O.K., and O.K’d a great many myself.
Q. That had been testified to as being correct by your brother canvassers when they were on the stand?—A. I don't understand that at all. We went to a house, we found the parties were living there, and O.K.'d the cards.
Q. Although people who came on the stand before you testified in regard to those names that the people had never lived there?—A. I never knew anything about that at all.
Because it is so ubiquitous and the true origin was unknown for so long, OK attracted a large number of folkloric explanations, a few plausible on their face, but none with any real evidence to support them. The closest to having evidence is the aforementioned legend that it was coined by Andrew Jackson. There is a 1790 record from Sumner County Tennessee that reads:
Andrew Jackson, Esq., proved a Bill of Sale from Hugh McGary to Gaspar Mansker, for a negro man, which was O.R.”
The O.R. was often read as O.K. over the years, and it was assumed Jackson couldn’t spell and wrote it to stand for oll korrect. But the initialism stands for order recorded, a standard scribal notation in such records.
Another alleged explanation, this one also connected to Andrew Jackson, is that OK is from the Choctaw oke or okeh, used to conclude expressions where an affirmation or denial is expected, essentially meaning “is it so?” or “right?” This explanation was first suggested by English professor W.S. Wyman in 1885:
General Jackson, as everybody knows, was prone to the use of downright and energetic methods of assertion. Hearing this emphatic oke so frequently uttered by the Choctaw people, he learned the meaning conveyed by it to the Choctaw mind, and appropriated it, out of hand, to his own purposes. From him it passed over to the multitude. This account of the origin of O.K. has been current in the South for many years. If not true, it is to so say the least, ben trovato.
The Choctaw explanation was enormously popular in its day, and it sounds plausible, but the evidence clearly shows that it is not correct.
Other folkloric explanations say that it was:
coined by John Jacob Astor, an immigrant from Germany and fur mogul. It seems likely that Astor used OK in the years following 1839, but he did not originate it.
a telegraphic abbreviation for open key
from a brand of rum from Aux Cayes, Haiti
from Orrin Kendall, a supplier to the Union army in the U.S. Civil War who allegedly stamped the initials on biscuits
from various people named O’Kelly or Obediah Kelly
from the Greek ὂλα καλά (ola kala, all good)
from the German Ober Kommando, allegedly used by von Steuben during the American Revolution or by other Prussian generals in other periods
from the French aux quais (to the wharves), used by French sailors in America during American Revolution when scheduling trysts with American women
from the Finnish oikea (correct).
None of these have a shred of evidence to support them.
The variant A-OK comes out of the U.S. space program. It entered into common parlance and was first recorded immediately following Alan Shepard’s sub-orbital space flight on 5 May 1961. Shepard was widely reported as saying A-OK throughout the fifteen-minute flight, although the official NASA transcript only records him using the ordinary okay. It’s possible the official transcript is not completely accurate. Alternatively, a NASA public affairs officer may have credited Shepard with using the word when speaking to reporters. Or, A-OK may have been said by fellow astronaut Deke Slayton, who was the capsule communicator or capcom for the mission with reporters mistakenly crediting it to Shepard. (Slayton’s half of the communication is not preserved in the official transcript.) In any case, it is abundantly clear that someone, and probably many people, at NASA were saying A-OK in May 1961.
An Associated Press report printed in the Dallas Morning News on 6 May 1961 has this:
Moments later Shepard reported he was at 30,000 feet on the way down.
“First chute was deployed,” he said. “Another ... all systems A-OK.”
These were the parachutes that dropped the capsule gently into the water.
By “A-OK,” Shepard meant that everything was “double OK”—or perfect.
Seconds later the historic flight was over.
Why the astronauts added the < A > to OK is not known. It has been suggested they did so because initial phonemes were sometimes lost in radio communications, but they did not do this with other words, so that explanation seems improbable. More likely, it is a blend of A-1, the long-established word meaning first rate or excellent, and OK.
And eight years later NASA would take OK to another world when the crew of Apollo 11 said it several times just before and after touching down on the Moon on 20 July 1969:
Capcom (CC): 30 seconds
Armstrong: Forward drift?
Aldrin: Yes ... Okay ... CONTACT LIGHT ... Okay. ENGINE STOP.
[Eagle touches down]
Aldrin: ACA—out of DETENT.
Armstrong: Out of DETENT.
Aldrin: MODE CONTROL—both AUTO. DESCENT ENGINE COMMAND OVERRIDE—OFF. ENGINE ARM—OFF ... 413 is in.
CC: We copy you down, Eagle.
Armstrong: THE EAGLE HAS LANDED.
CC: Roger, Tranquility. We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot.
Armstrong: Thank you.
CC: You’re looking good here.
Armstrong: Okay. We’re going to be busy for a minute.
Sources:
Boston Morning Post, 12 June 1838, 2. NewspaperArchive.com.
———, 7 February 1839, 1. NewspaperArchive.com.
———, 23 March 1839, 2. NewspaperArchive.com.
———, 10 April 1839, 2. NewspaperArchive.com.
———, 18 December 1839, 2. NewspaperArchive.com.
Dighton, Ralph. “Shepard Cracks Space for U.S.” Associated Press. Dallas Morning News (Texas), 6 May, 1961, 1. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Dow, Jr. (pseudonym of Elbridge Gerry Paige). “Number XLII: On Fortitude.” Short Patent Sermons. New York: Lawrence Labree, 1841, 106. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Hotten, John Camden. The Slang Dictionary. London: Hotten, 1864, 191. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
“Indian Hospitality.” Graphic (London), 17 March 1883, 287. Gale Primary Sources: British Library Newspapers.
National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA). Apollo 11 Technical Air-to-Ground Voice Transcription. July 1969. 316–17.
———. NASA Project Mercury Working Paper No. 192: Postlaunch Report for Mercury-Redstone No. 3 (MR-3). 16 June 1961.
“O.K.” Notes and Queries, 3rd series, 10, 18 August 1866, 128.
Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2021, s.v. OK, adj., int.1, n.2, and adv.; December 2020, s.v. OK, v.
Read, Allen Walker. “Could Andrew Jackson Spell?” American Speech, 38.3, October 1963, 188–95. JSTOR.
———. “The Evidence on ‘O.K.’” Saturday Review of Literature, 24.13, 19 July 1941, 3–4, 10–11. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
———. “The First Stage in the History of ‘O.K.’” American Speech, 38.1, February 1963, 5–27. JSTOR.
———. “The Folklore of ‘O.K.’” American Speech, 39.1, February 1964, 5–25. JSTOR.
———. “Later Stages in the History of ‘O.K.’” American Speech, 39.2, May 1964, 83–101. JSTOR.
———. “The Second Stage in the History of ‘O.K.’” American Speech, 38.2, May 1963, 83–102. JSTOR.
———. “Successive Revisions in the Explanation of ‘O.K.’” American Speech, 39.4, December 1964, 243–267. JSTOR.
“A Singular Present.” Baltimore Sun, 24 February 1840, 2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.
Testimony and Papers in the Contested-Election Case of Sessinghaus vs. Frost, from the Third Congressional District of Missouri. U.S. House of Representatives, 47th Congress, 1st Session, Mis. Doc 27, Part 3. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1882, 2705. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Wyman, W.S. Letter (5 July 1885). Magazine of American History, 14, 212–213. HathiTrust Digital Archive.
Photo credit: Matthew Brady, c.1856, salted paper print from a glass negative. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain image.