Origins of O.K

superconor

One of the phrases we use most is O.K.
Where did this phrase originate?
does it stand for something?
if so what?

Webmonkey

Good question. I done some googling and came up with this:

http://www.urbanlegends.com/language/etymology/ok_etymology_of.html

sci0x

Here is another interesting report on the Origins Of OK

Gordon

I haven't looked at those links but one of the origins is said to be from the Greek "Ola Kala" which means - All well.

CuLT

It's a bit of a stretch but the Japanese word for "Roger" is "Yokai" [Not sure of spelling] , still, sounds similar to "okay" and it has a similar meaning .

BoobeR

Okay then
Semms like there's lots of origins, I think we should be searching for origins of "Okay" since OK is short for that.. isn't it?

Talliesin

I like the explanation linking it to "Roger", unfortunately it is easily disproved, "Roger" in that sense is short for "Roger Wilco" which was the old British radio alphabet for RW (these days that would be "Romeo Whiskey"), which in turn stands for Received, Will Comply in response to an order. The origin is from WWII, or else shortly before WWII but coming into greater circulation then for obvious reasons, OK has existed at least as far back as the 19th century.

sceptre

With regard to the second provided link, it can't originate with the OK Club as that club was formed to promote Martin van Buren's presidential candidacy. The club wasn't formed till 1840.

As the first link says the first mention of the phrase in print that has been found (found, incidentally by Prof. Walker Read, in 1941, after poking through old newspspers for twenty years) is from the Boston Morning Post in the "spring of 1839"

It's actually from the issue of March 23, 1839 (it'd have been nice if the page had said this but feel free to email them and let them know). In the mid- to late-1830s there was a fad for odd abbreviations (as there is now on the Net (btw, rofl and so on) - such as KG for Know Go, KY for Know Yous, TBFTB for Too Big For Their Breeches, RTBS for Remains To be Seen and so on (there are quite a few other examples but these were the most popular). Hence using OK as an abbreviation for Oll (or "all") Korrect (or "correct") wouldn't have been as odd at the time as you might think. I'd imagine the theory linking OK to Olla Lalla owes far more to an attempt to link it to one of the classical languages after the fact than anything else.

Like so many of these things (have fun reading the hundreds of explanations for the "Real McCoy" and like phrases) the phrase was almost certainly in non-print use for some time before anyone thought of using the jocularism in print. Hence, we'll probably never know for sure.

@CuLT
Unfortunately wrong (from Talliesin's posting) but I like the way you think. There was very little Western contact with Japan till Matthew Perry sailed into Yedo Bay in 1853 in any case.

@BoobeR
"OK" has far earlier references in print than "Okay" We can safely assume that OK came first, unless a misunderstanding happened twice.

TetsuoHashimoto

It is a word that has grown from recent European slang,
just like the word Jeep has developed out of G.P or general purpose veichle

Ok was used by many Euorpean postal and shipping companies , Dutch, English, French, Danish many marked their paperwork and documents with Oll Korrect, eventually this became a type of slang used by the shipping firms and truckers and the word grew from there, got it now, OK?