The ENTIRE History Of "OK"

Where does the word OK actually come from? This is the complete history of OK, maybe the most used word on Earth, from a throwaway 1839 spelling joke in a Boston newspaper to a presidential campaign, a hundred years of wrong guesses, and the stubborn professor who finally cracked it. For over a century nobody could agree where OK came from. People swore it was Ancient Greek, a port in Haiti, a Scottish phrase, even a brand of army biscuits, and every guess was wrong. The real answer is dumber than all of them: in 1839 a bored Boston newspaper editor named Charles Gordon Greene was riffing on a local fad of misspelling phrases and shortening them to initials, and he wrote "o.k." for "oll korrect," a joke version of "all correct." It should have died in a week, but a year later Martin Van Buren's 1840 campaign turned OK into a slogan for his nickname "Old Kinderhook," and even though Van Buren lost, the two letters blew up. We trace the whole story: the copycat "O.W." that came first, the fog of fake origins that filled the gap once people forgot (Andrew Jackson, "zero killed," the Choctaw "okeh" that President Woodrow Wilson believed for the rest of his life), the stubborn professor Allen Walker Read who finally dug the truth out of crumbling old newspapers in the 1960s, and how one tiny typo went on to conquer the telegraph, hundreds of languages, and eventually the Moon. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ 📚 SOURCES ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ Smithsonian Magazine, How One Man Discovered the Obscure Origins of the Word 'OK' Traces OK to March 23, 1839 in the Boston Morning Post, where editor Charles Gordon Greene used it as a joke abbreviation of "oll korrect," and how linguist Allen Walker Read uncovered and proved it. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-one-man-discovered-the-obscure-origins-of-the-word-ok-180953258/ History.com, The Birth of 'OK' Covers the spelling-joke origin, how Martin Van Buren's "Old Kinderhook" campaign spread it, and the false t