I was gallivanting around the corners of the internet the other day, when I realized that I had no idea what the abbreviation 'O.K' stood for. Naturally I immediately found as much information as I could on the matter, which surprisingly wasn't much. Here's what I learned:
There are theories abound to how we came to incorporate 'okay' into our language, but no one really seems to know exactly when and how it came to be. A Tennessee historian with less time on his hands than me has claimed to have found the earliest recorded use of the word to be in 1790, when Andrew Jackson supposedly said "proved a bill of sale from Hugh McGary to Gasper Mansker, for an uncalled good, which was O.K." But, unfortunately for the Tennessee historian, the general consensus is that the recorded use was in 1815, where someone wrote "we arrived ok" in their diary.
What's strange is that while there are examples all over the place of the earliest usage, there are hardly any examples for when it became the overused word it is today. Even stranger is despite nobody knowing what it stands for or where it came from, 'OK' has evolved in remarkable ways extremely quickly. A perfect example of this is how it has changed just in the last decade. Does anybody remember everyone spelling the word as an abbreviation in the 90's? I was in school then (I'm a youngster, I know), and I used to get marked down for spelling the word as 'okay' or even 'OK'. The correct spelling was supposedly O.K. I for one haven't seen it spelled like that since the 90's.
But beyond the spelling technicalities, the word is one of the most commonly used in the United States, it's so widely known that other countries have adopted it into their own language, often making the pronunciation sound like the American version. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve encountered a language barrier, only to have the other party say “okay” over and over again because it was one of the few English words they knew. It’s also rapidly becoming a cultural and technological icon. ‘Okay’ has all but replaced the word yes on our computers, particularly online. Not to mention the various catch phrases it’s created, Okely Dokely or Mmkay ring any bells?
And yet, nobody knows what it means. I guarantee you can ask ten or twenty people what the letters O.K. stand for, and they won’t have any clue. But never fear, the internet hasn’t failed me quite yet. There are three main theories that explain 'okay', I say main theories because they are the only ones with actual academic support.
Theory number one: Old Kinderhook
Hardly worth mentioning as it has the least support and makes the least sense, but I’ll include it out of fairness. A guy named Allen Read noticed that Martin Van Buren (the eighth president of the United States) lived in a residence in Kinderhook, New York that was very rarely referred to as Old Kinderhook. Read’s supporting evidence includes a breast pin from the 1840’s with the letters O.K. on it, celebrating Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. And that’s about it. I included this theory because for some reason it was immediately accepted back in the 1960’s when it was first published, and thus is offered in almost every dictionary used today (although most dictionaries also offer the third theory). Sometimes things just don’t make any sense.
Theory number two: African or Scottish Origins
The most boring theory, but still a very likely one, is that the word okay stemmed from either Scottish immigrants and/or African slaves. There are examples all over the place of strikingly similar sounding words used by African slaves in America, such as “Oh kee”, “kay” and “O ki”. I can personally attest for this one, if you ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin (written in the 1800’s about the quality of life for some fictional African slaves) you’ll see similar phrases used frequently. The Scottish equivalent is that a large number of Scottish immigrants used the phrase “och aye” to mean ‘oh yes’, and ‘och aye’ kind of sounds like okay. The general idea with this theory is that as America is a melting pot, our language is too, which is very true. It’s likely that this theory explains our use of the word, but it has one major flaw. Until recently, okay was almost always known as O.K. or OK, and this theory doesn’t clearly explain what those letters stand for.
Theory number three: Oll Korrect
It’s up to you to decide if I’m a cynic or a realist but in my opinion, this theory seems the most likely, in addition to being my personal favorite. It starts like this; around the time that ‘OK’ started cropping up in print, an American inside joke that still exists today started turning into a comical fad. That fad was commonly misspelled words. Kind of like how the whole ‘teh’ thing came into play recently. It can be argued that education wasn’t as widely perused as it is today, so often times people would spell words based off how they sounded in the region they were in. For example, in North Carolina the phrase ‘enough said’ was often spelled ‘nuff ced’ (now a days we spell it ‘nuff said’, kudos America). The misspelled phrase that supposedly kicked off the word ‘okay’ was ‘all correct’. It was often spelled 'oll korrect', which everybody found immensely funny because the internet didn’t exist yet. As the joke continued, people would spell it incorrectly on purpose, eventually abbreviating it to OK. A hundred years past, and we were still saying OK, except nobody really knew why anymore. Not only does this theory have the clearest written record, but it is honestly the most probable as well. I mean, who doesn’t expect this exact situation to eventually happen with LOL?
So there you have it, we thought it was funny that everybody misspelled everything, and it's likely that the people who used OK on purpose back then were making fun of the less educated. Then we forgot that it was just a joke and incorporated the word into an American icon. Embarrassing? Yes. Probable? Yes.
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