1 day ago
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Opinion
April 4, 2026 — 5:30am
Almost 200 years ago, newspapers loved to bait each other. Maybe we still do, but back then the bickering was playful, a show-fight between mates where one masthead niggled the another, derided its taste or quality. Only to have the grenade lobbed back by the rival’s editorial. These long-running spats sold copies, of course, and coaxed a word into being.
Two if you’re picky: oll korrect. The phonetic spelling – coined on March 23, 1839 – was a snub by Charles Gordon Greene, editor of the Boston Morning Post, aimed at the so-called bumpkin status of the Providence Journal. Back then, like now, the craze was abbreviation, seeing Greene’s phrase trimmed to o.k. (full stops included).
Catchy to say and write, as time proved. Since other slurs traded between gazettes, including KG (“know go”) and OW (“oll wright”), were quick to join the compost. Unlike ok (as it became), the novelty catching fire, fanned by Martin van Buren’s presidential campaign a year on.
Born in Kinderhook, NY, the Democrat was dubbed OK, or Old Kinderhook, the nickname lending the newspaper prank some political momentum. Lobby groups labelled OK Clubs emerged, soon meshing with the early telegraph services where ok was shorter and cheaper than such windy alternatives as “confirmed”, or “agreed” or “yes”.
Okay, the longer form, is a hypercorrection. One favoured by Louisa May Alcott in 1868, where the novelty pops up in Little Women: “One of us must marry well. Meg didn’t, Jo won’t, Beth can’t yet, so I shall, and make everything okay all round.” Though curiously, in some later editions, the buzzword was swapped for “cozy”.
A century later, Buzz Aldrin anointed the variation of AOK, shorthand for All (Systems) OK. The slang had well and truly landed, a giant leap for most of the planet’s languages. Though we should acknowledge Allen Walker Read, the US etymologist who unearthed the newspaper roots, back in 1963, after a prolonged mission.
Without him, perhaps, we’d be stuck with the umpteen claims of how ok came to be, a field that Yale linguist Larry Horn ingeniously calls “etymythology”. The folkloric contenders are many, from och-aye in Scottish to Greek’s ola kala – or everything is fine. Both plausible bids, though bogus. In league with Ohne Korrectur (“no changes”) in German, or the biscuits rationed during the US Civil War, where bakery giant Orrin Kendall stamped their two initials in the dough.
Native American tribe Choctaw’s okeh (“it is not otherwise”) gibes with the affirmative semantics, far more than US railroad agent Obediah Kelly, or “au quai” (to the dock) in French, yet each link is fanciful. Ditto for 0K (stat-speak for zero killed), proving why word-sourcing is much like spelunking rabbit holes.
Away from origins, ok is a rarity that answers to noun, verb, adjective, adverb and interjection. And just like Coke and pizza, ok is a word known to most languages. It’s also generated its own zeitgeist hierarchy. Depending on your mood, writers and texters can opt for ok (neutral), OK (shouty), O.K. (stern), Ok (ambivalent), k (lazy), K (cold), kk (enthusiastic) – or nuances in between. As last month marked OK Day (not to be confused with R U OK? Day), tomorrow guarantees that even more ok is on its way.
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