Colonel Commander, In Les Cayes, och are, λλ Orrin Kendallokay. There are many theories and everything is OK, but the best defended is oll korrect.
The Portuguese use it constantly — in fact, younger people even write it twice in a row (okok). And if you talk to practically anyone from another part of the world, from Portugal to Tonga, we will all understand what “OK” means.
However, despite being probably the most ubiquitous word in the world, its origin continues to have a touch of mystery. Let’s unravel it, OK?
First of all: “OK” is a word chameleon. It means “ok” and, at the same time, especially in English, “more or less” or “fine”. But it is also used to begin or end a subject, grant authorization, give approval, buy time, demonstrate agreement or can even be used to fill in gaps in a conversation.
But after all, where did “OK” come from and how did it become so popular?
More theories than OKs
For a long time, the etymology of “OK” was a battlefield, compares . The term was so popular that it seemed impossible not to have a clear origin story.
Some defended a German military origin, such as initials Colonel Commander. (Colonel Commander). There were French people who linked the term to Les Cayesa place in Haiti associated with rum. Others retreated to a possible British antecedent, claiming that use in England predated any North American influence. Links to the Scotsman also appeared and ayeto Greek expressions used by teachers (All good“alright”), in Finnish right (“correct”), or the Latin “All correct” — an ironic explanation for allegedly using “wrong” initials.
There was also no shortage of “industrial” theories: marks on naval wood (“outer keel”), telegraph operators (“open key”, ready to transmit), habits of German typographers who would accept manuscripts with “Without correction” (“no correction”).
There are also versions that link the word to certification practices, real observatories or even food biscuits in the North American Civil War attributed to an alleged Orrin Kendall.
There were those who pointed to West African originssuggesting that sounds similar to “OK” would appear in languages spoken by enslaved people taken to the USA, where similar-sounding expressions would mean something like “yes” or “that’s it”.
Another way proposed a Amerindian origin: o choctaw “okay” (“é”), which would have entered English through contact with indigenous communities or by political and military figures from the beginning of the 19th century. North American President Woodrow Wilson, for example, approved documents with the signature “Okeh”.
Faced with so many theories, none of them were “OK” for everyone, which is why a researcher decided to carry out research with a method, from start to finish.
The most robust theory
In the 1960s, Allen Walker Read dedicated himself to tracing the documentary history of “OK”.
The work led him to a decisive find: a reference in a Boston newspaper, the Boston Morning Post, published on March 23, 1839. This record predates the Civil War by more than two decades and appears years before the first telegraph message.
But the piece had a disconcerting peculiarity: it explained “OK” as the initials of “all correct” (“everything is correct”). If the intention was just to abbreviate “all correct”, why not “AC”? The answer, argued Read, lies in a very specific linguistic fashion that would have taken over Boston in 1838: a “fever” of abbreviations accompanied by a parallel tendency towards purposefully wrong spelling.
It was abbreviated and, at the same time, it was written “badly” on purpose — a humorous code. Thus, “all correct” would have been transformed into “oll korrect”, generating the “OK”.
Naturally, not everyone accepts Read’s explanation as definitive. Defenders of alternative versions persist. But, in the picture presented by researchers and dictionaries, the combination of “oll korrect”, Bostonian fashion and a strong political impulse from 1840 (very well detailed by IFL Science) forms the most robust narrative today, as it is based on datable records and a verifiable historical context.
