Made in America: The Ridiculous History of “OK”



“OK” is probably the most spoken word in the world, and yet almost nobody can tell you what those two letters stand for or where the word came from. In the early 19th century, new printing technologies dramatically reduced the cost of publishing a daily newspaper, and there was a resulting explosion of inexpensive new dailies known collectively as the penny press. Think of it as the Internet of the 1830s, and much like the Internet, the lively back-and-forth chatter between penny paper editors gave birth to a new way of writing and eventually a new way of speaking. Newspapers like the Boston Morning Post and New York’s Evening Tattler sprinkled their columns with acronyms for everything and anything to save room:


  • • O.F.M. ("our first men")
  • • W.O.O.O.F.C. ("with one of our first citizens")
  • • R.T.B.S. ("remains to be seen")
  • • D.L.E.C. ("do let 'em come")
  • • G.T.D.H.D. ("give the devil his due")
  • • W.Y.G. ("will you go?”
 
By the late 1830s, the hilarious misspelling trend had combined with the acronym craze to produce punchy abbreviations like:

  • • K.G. for "no go" (as if spelled "know go")
  • • K.Y. for "no use" (as if spelled "know yuse")
  • • O.W. for "all right" (as if spelled "oll wright”)

Charles Gordon Greene, Editor of Boston Morning Post, was engaged in some good-natured trash talk with the editors of The Providence Journal in Rhode Island. It had to do with a semi-satirical citizens group in Boston called the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society (or A.B.R.S.), of which Greene was a member. The Providence Journal poked fun at Greene and the A.B.R.S. and Greene had to set the record straight. So it was that on March 21, 1839, at the end of a short paragraph defending the A.B.R.S., Greene printed the following words: "o.k. — all correct.” Similar to using O.W. for "oll wright," Greene had coined a new misspelled acronym: O.K. for "oll korrect." Three days after Greene introduced OK to the world, The Providence Journal editors responded with an "O.K." of their own. Nobody knew that this joking abbreviation would have such a long and happy life.