what is the history of the word "OK"?

Answer 1

Okay is a term of approval or assent, often written as OK, O.K., ok, okay, okee, or more informally as simply kay, k or kk. Sometimes used with other words, as in "okey, dokey". When used to describe the quality of a thing, it denotes acceptability. However, its usage can also be strongly approving; as with most slang, its usage is determined by context. It could be one of the most widely used words on Earth, since it has spread from English to many other languages.

The historical record shows that "O.K." appeared as an abbreviation for oll korrect (a conscious misspelling of "all correct") in Boston newspapers in 1839, and was reinterpreted as "Old Kinderhook" in the 1840 United States presidential election. Because it is a recent word borne of word play, and because it is so widely used, "O.K." has also invited many folk etymologies. These competing theories are not supported by the historical written record, except in that folk and joke etymologies influenced the true history of the word. Since the 19th century, the word has spread around the world, the "okay" spelling of it first appearing in British writing in the 1860s. Spelled out in full in the 20th century, 'okay' has come to be in everyday use among English speakers, and borrowed by non-English speakers. Occasionally a humorous form okee dokee (or okey dokey) is used, as well as A-ok.

According to languagemonitor.com, "O.K." is the Most Frequently Spoken Word on the Planet.

FOR MORE DETAILED INFO :http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okay
BEST REGARDS,

Answer 2

Everybody seems to be unanimous on the view that the word is of media origin first making an appearance in 1839.

If it is a matter of written evidence alone there is no alternative to its acceptance. However, it cannot be that the phrase was the brainchild of some reoporter alone. This is especially so because a similar phrase also appears in some Red Indian languages and also European languages from which it could have perlocated to the press. Of course,if you would demand written admission of this commission frankly speaking we have none. Obviously,however, these language/dialects have a hoary origin far beyong 1839.Thus,

President Woodrow Wilson attributed "OK" to the Choctaw word "okeh", which means "it is so". (This may be slightly different from the main sense of "O.K." as "acceptable", or "I agree".) Wilson accepted the Jackson etymology and supposed that Jackson took the word from Choctaw. But this etymology, like all etymologies other than the one found by Read, lacks a clear historical record.

It has been suggested that in World War II the term "zero killed" was used when a unit suffered no casualties in combat, and that this was then shortened to "0K". This proposed etymology is grossly anachronistic, since by this time the term had been widely used for a full century. The same theory has also been applied to the Civil War, but this is also anachronistic.

There are also many proposed international etymologies of "O.K.", but they lack supporting written evidence just as the American folk etymologies do.

In Greek, "O.K." is a correctly-spelled abbreviation for the expression, Ola Kala (Ολα Καλά, ΟΚ), which has the same meaning as the American English "okay". It is possible that Greek sailors used Ola Kala in American ports.

"Waw-kay" is an exclamation in both Bantu and Wolof dialects, "kay" being a word meaning "yes," and "waw" an emphatic; "waw-kay" is an emphatic "yes." It is observed that of all the things a newly arrived slave might be expected to utter in the presence of their English-speaking master, the single most frequent would surely be an emphatic yes. Some other English words such as "jive" ("jev") and "banana" have uncontested Bantu or Wolof origins.

The word of assention in Occitan is oc (from Latin hoc), as opposed to oïl (< Lat. "hoc ille), the ancestor of the modern French oui, from the langue d'oïl of Northern France. However, before the word "okay" appeared in American English, the final consonant in Occitan oc had become silent, leading to the pronunciation [o:].

French fishermen, including those based in New Orleans, might sometimes have used the phrase "au quai", literally "to the quay", to mean that a fishing trip was successful (or went okay) and therefore there were fish to unload at the quay.

In view of this while the American can certainly claim to be the first to use the term in the print media leading to its spread all over they have no case of claiming its parentage.The term was in colloquial use in many dialects/languages long before the reporters or even their papers had seen the light of the day.

Answer 3

The wordplay origin of "O.K." invited folk etymology and joke etymology from the beginning. Eventually there appeared folk etymologies that were not connected with either word play or the 1840 Presidential election. In particular, in 1859, a Tennessee historian named Albigence Waldo Putnam misread an appearance of "O.R." in a 1790 missive by Andrew Jackson as "O.K.". This made Andrew Jackson the dominant theory of the origin of "O.K." until it was disproven by Woodford Heflin in 1941 using photographic analysis.

President Woodrow Wilson attributed "OK" to the Choctaw word "okeh", which means "it is so". (This may be slightly different from the main sense of "O.K." as "acceptable", or "I agree".) Wilson accepted the Jackson etymology and supposed that Jackson took the word from Choctaw. But this etymology, like all etymologies other than the one found by Read, lacks a clear historical record.

It has been suggested that in World War II the term "zero killed" was used when a unit suffered no casualties in combat, and that this was then shortened to "0K". This proposed etymology is grossly anachronistic, since by this time the term had been widely used for a full century. The same theory has also been applied to the Civil War, but this is also anachronistic.

There are also many proposed international etymologies of "O.K.", but they lack supporting written evidence just as the American folk etymologies do.

In Greek, "O.K." is a correctly-spelled abbreviation for the expression, Ola Kala (Ολα Καλά, ΟΚ), which has the same meaning as the American English "okay". It is possible that Greek sailors used Ola Kala in American ports.

"Waw-kay" is an exclamation in both Bantu and Wolof dialects, "kay" being a word meaning "yes," and "waw" an emphatic; "waw-kay" is an emphatic "yes." It is observed that of all the things a newly arrived slave might be expected to utter in the presence of their English-speaking master, the single most frequent would surely be an emphatic yes. Some other English words such as "jive" ("jev") and "banana" have uncontested Bantu or Wolof origins.

The word of assention in Occitan is oc (from Latin hoc), as opposed to oïl (< Lat. "hoc ille), the ancestor of the modern French oui, from the langue d'oïl of Northern France. However, before the word "okay" appeared in American English, the final consonant in Occitan oc had become silent, leading to the pronunciation [o:].

French fishermen, including those based in New Orleans, might sometimes have used the phrase "au quai", literally "to the quay", to mean that a fishing trip was successful (or went okay) and therefore there were fish to unload at the quay.

The term OK is also used by typesetters and people working in publishing. A manuscript that did not need any changes or corrections would be marked "O.K." for Ohne Korrektur (German for "no changes"). Other stories are that it comes from the British English word hoacky (the last load of the harvest), the Finnish word oikein ("that's right"), the Scottish expression och aye ("oh yes"), or the French aux Cayes or au quai.

Answer 4

A SHORT COMPENDIUM OF THE HISTORY OF "OK"

OK, let's get this straight. OK is probably not, as formerly believed, from Choctaw oke, variant hoke, meaning 'Yes, it is', but perhaps rather from the banners of the O.K. Club, the Democratic party's Manhattan political club for the election of 1840. In this usage OK is an appellation for Old Kinderhook, the nickname of Martin Van Buren (president of the U.S. 1837-1841), whose birthplace was Kinderhook, New York.


There is another faction that associates the use of OK with the frontiersman-President, Andrew Jackson, who allegedly used it as an abbreviation for 'oll korrect'. (He was a notorious misspeller.)

The weight of the evidence goes to the Van Buren Democrats, however, because the earliest verifiable use so far noted is in the Boston Transcript of 15 April 1840. In this and two examples from April and June the meaning is not clear. The explanation of 'oll korrect' appears on June 18, attributed to General Jackson, but this was probably not intended to be taken seriously. Other jocular explanations of the initials follow in the same year.


Still, people are fiendishly creative. See below. OK does not come from:


1- a railroad freight agent Obadiah Kelly who initialed bills of lading;
2- an indian chief Old Keokuk who wrote his initials on treaties;
3- "outer keel' that shipbuilders once put on some of their timbers;
4- the teacher's comment "omnis korrectes" written on perfect exam papers;
5- boxes of Orrin-Kendall crackers, popular with Union troops during the Civil War;
6- an English farm word hoacky, meaning the last load of the harvest;
7- a Choctaw work okeh...

The final word on OK came when Allen Walker Read nailed down the origin of OK in an article in the Saturday Review of Literature in 1941, and its history was subsequently sealed in a series of articles in American Speech in 1963-64. OK started out as part of a humorous fad or game of abbreviating phrases in an outrageous way (sometimes humorously misspelled to add to the fun) among a few Boston and New York writers, journalists, and wits in the summer of 1838. (OK meant "oll korrect"; OW or AR meant "oll wright"; KY meant "know yuse"; NSMJ meant "nuf said (a)mong jintlemen"; and so on). OK was a Boston coinage that first appeared in print in the Boston Morning Post, March 23, 1839. Meaning "oll korrect," it had moved to New York City by March 11, 1840, when a Tammany newspaper, The New York Era, advertised the forming of a new Tammany social club, the Democratic O.K. Club. On March 27th the same paper printed OK in the large letters of a heading to a piece giving indirect support to a suggestion to break up a scheduled Whig meeting--which Tammany supporters and thugs did on the 28th, using the cheer O.K.! During the rest of that presidential campaign year of 1840 "oll korrect" and OK became Democratic rallying cries, strongly reinforced by the fact that Democratic president and candidate for reelection, Martin Van Buren, was called "Old Kinderhook". Supporters of the Whig candidate, William Henry Harrison, countered by reminding the public that Van Buren had been Jackson's hand-picked successor and spread the story that OK had been Jackson's uneducated way of spelling "all correct."

Answer 5

Word and phrase origins.

http://www.wordorigins.org/

http://www.worldwidewords.org/

http://www.takeourword.com/index.html

This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they're explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php

Origin Unknown (words of unknown origin)

http://www.well.com/user/smalin/unknown.html

Good luck.

Kevin, Liverpool, England.

Answer 6

the word ok was first used by a newspaper in america and continues to be used