Where did the term “OK/Okay” come from?

Question

I've heard lots of varying histories of the term "OK".

Is there any evidence of the true origin of the term?

Answer 1

According to the OED, it's an initialism of oll (or orl) korrect, first seen in 1839, something apparently quite funny. It was reinforced by another initialism OK from the nickname of president Martin Van Buren, Old Kinderhook during his electoral campaign. The verb was null-derived from this around 1882.

Other ideas include that it was a Choctaw word oke, meaning 'it is'; also the French and Scottish ideas as well.

Answer 2

I'm really surprised no one linked to this excellent article on The Straight Dope:

"The etymology of OK was masterfully explained by the distinguished Columbia University professor Allen Walker Read in a series of articles in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964."

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/503/what-does-ok-stand-for

Answer 3

The etymology from a jokey acronym is a 1960s fabrication. There is no way that such nonsense would catch on without a reinforcing loan-word borrowing. The acronyms by themselves are not funny. They become funny if people were already using terms that sounded like these acronyms, and these terms were poking fun at illiterate misunderstandings of these terms.

Like in a region with many spanish speakers, the following acronym might be funny:

C.C.: Correct, Captain (Si, Si)

In the 19th century, the U.S. was not an English speaking nation--- only the settled parts were. The frontier parts had large Choctaw speaking swaths, and settlers and natives had to be at least bilingual to get along. There is no doubt that a large number of loanwords were floating around at the time, and some of them might sound like some letters. Then if someone wrote down a dictionary of abbreviations that sounded like Choctaw loanwords, it would actually be funny. OK as "Oll Korrect" for example.

Due to the atrocious American Native policies, the death marches and so on, anything to do with natives was systematically erased from the collective memory, and replaced by nonsense. I believe that Ok is frontier Choctaw, Okeh (pronounced okay), and was given a non-native etymology as part of the program of erasing native contributions from the collective memory.

See this page for a complete convincing argument, a demolition of the fabricated "Oll Korrect" or "Old Kinderhook" etymologies (both related), and more detail: http://www.illinoisprairie.info/chocokeh.htm . The dictionaries of the 19th century knew it was Choctaw.

Answer 4

Yes. The consensus opinion is probably right. In the early 19th century, it became all the rage to have playfully misspelled/mispronunciations/abbreviations for common phrases -- "all correct" became "oil korrect"; A.C. became O.K. The Martin Van Buren presidential campaign reinforced usage of the "OK" entity. He hailed from "Old Kinderhook", New York -- a reference to a section of land where children played or which had a rock formation that looked like a child's face.

"Old Kinderhook is OK" was his campaign slogan.

As an aside, many people think that the word "hooker" came directly from General Joseph Hooker of the U.S. Union Army in the Civil War (1861-1865). He and his men were hard drinkers and frequented prostitutes, and the story goes that the women seen around him became known as "hooker's women", then just "hookers".

But the term "hooker"was in use in England in the 1840s, long before the General became a household name. As with "Old Kinderhook", there may have been reinforcement of the term, but it certainly wasn't started by him.

Answer 5

In my history class last year, I was told that it originated from US President Martin van Buren's campaign slogan, "Old Kinderhook." According to Wikipedia, that's only one theory. Etymonline says that "Oll Korrect" is the origin, and "Old Kinderhook" is how it became popular.

Answer 6

The consensus opinion is that it likely derived from a jokey abbreviation for "oll korrect," which was hilarious back in the 19th century.