Where is "OK" comming from and what it represents?

Question

What are the roots of this word? Thankyou :)

Answer 1

The explanation includes the two preceding answers (newspaper use and 1840 Presidential campaign). Here's the larger context, and how they fit together:


There are many explanations still bouncing around (some of them guesses, some of them were simply made up), but as a matter of fact, the question was decisively answered by Columbia University professor Allen Walker Read over 40 years ago in a series of articles.

"OK" was invented as a humorous abbreviation for "oll korrect" in the midst of a popular fad for such abbreviations, which began to appear in Boston newspapers ca. 1838 (then spread across the nation). "OK" first appeared in newsprint in 1839 and was, like many other expressions of the time, very popular.

But this one outlived them all BECAUSE of "Old Kinderhook", the nickname for U.S. Vice President Martin VanBuren, who was running for President in 1840.

(The name comes from the fact that his hometown was Kinderhook, New York. I don't have the documentation, but I believe "OLD Kinderhook" may have been coined by analogy with then President Andrew Jackson's nickname "Old Hickory." or other nicknames of this pattern which were popular in the first half 19th century.)

At any rate, supporters of "Old Kinderhook" decided to play off the newly popular expression, and formed "OK Clubs" to support him. The widespread use in the political campaign across the country established this abbreviation, which people discovered was rather handy, so it stuck.

So, two of the common explanations for the term are... 'OK'. The third most common explanation offered -- that Andrew Jackson, not the best of spellers, actually wrote the notation "OK" on papers, intending to mark them as "all correct". This explanation (and others) was the invention of Jackson critics, their response to the VanBuren campaign.

(Tt\he ORDER is important -- first the humorous coinage, THEN the VanBuren campaign. Reed documented the usage of this and other humorous abbreviations... AND there is no record of the abbreviation being used BEFORE that time.)

Answer 2

What is known is that one of the first instances of OK appearing in print was in the spring of 1839 by the Boston Morning Post:

It is hardly necessary to say to those who know Mr. Hughes, that his establishment will be found to be 'A. No. One' -- that is, O.K. -- all correct.

So if OK stands for "all correct," wouldn't it be "AC"? Not exactly, says linguist Erin McKean, who points out that the word was intentionally misspelled. Much like the way people on the Internet shorten or abbreviate words when typing, OK was misspelled on purpose.

Answer 3

Its an abreviated form of "oll korrect", a misspelling of the phrase "all correct". It became popular during the 1840 U.S. presidential election between Martin Van Buren and Andrew Jackson.