Many explanations for the origin of the expression have been suggested, but few have been discussed seriously by
linguists. The following proposals have found mainstream recognition.
Boston abbreviation fad The
etymology that most reference works provide today is based on a survey of the word's early history in print: a series of six articles by
Allen Walker Read in the journal
American Speech in 1963 and 1964. He tracked the spread and evolution of the word in American newspapers and other written documents, and later throughout the rest of the world. He also documented controversy surrounding
OK and the history of its
folk etymologies, both of which are intertwined with the history of the word itself. Read argues that, at the time of the expression's first appearance in print, a broader
fad existed in the United States of "comical misspellings" and of forming and employing acronyms, themselves based on colloquial speech patterns: The general fad is speculated to have existed in spoken or informal written U.S. English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers.
OKs original presentation as "all correct" was later varied with spellings such as "Oll Korrect" or even "Ole Kurreck". The term appears to have achieved national prominence in 1840, when supporters of the
Democratic Party claimed during the
1840 United States presidential election that it stood for "Old Kinderhook", a nickname for the Democratic president and candidate for reelection,
Martin Van Buren, a native of
Kinderhook, New York. "Vote for OK" was snappier than using his Dutch name. Read himself was nevertheless open to evaluating alternative explanations:
Choctaw In "All Mixed Up", the folk singer
Pete Seeger sang that
OK was of
Choctaw origin, as the dictionaries of the time tended to agree. Three major American reference works (Webster's, New Century, Funk & Wagnalls) cited this etymology as the probable origin until as late as 1961. The earliest written evidence for the Choctaw origin is provided in work by the Christian missionaries
Cyrus Byington and Alfred Wright in 1825. These missionaries ended many sentences in their translation of the Bible with the
particle "okeh", meaning "it is so", which was listed as an alternative spelling in the 1913 Webster's. Byington's
Dictionary of the Choctaw Language confirms the ubiquity of the "okeh" particle, and his
Grammar of the Choctaw Language calls the particle
-keh an "affirmative contradistinctive", with the "distinctive" o- prefix. The
Choctaw language was one of the languages spoken at this time in the
Southeastern United States by a tribe with significant contact with African slaves. The major language of trade in this area,
Mobilian Jargon, was based on Choctaw-Chickasaw, two
Muskogean-family languages. This language was used, in particular, for communication with the slave-owning
Cherokee (an
Iroquoian-family language). For the three decades prior to the Boston abbreviation fad, the Choctaw had been in extensive negotiation with the U.S. government, after having fought alongside them at the
Battle of New Orleans. Arguments for a more Southern origin for the word note the tendency of English to adopt loan words in
language contact situations, as well as the ubiquity of the OK particle. Similar particles exist in native language groups distinct from Iroquoian (
Algonquian,
Cree cf. "ekosi").
West African An early attestation of the particle 'kay' is found in a 1784 transcription of a North Carolina slave, who, seeking to avoid being flogged, explained being found asleep in the canoe he had been ordered to bring to a certain place to pick up a European exploring near his newly-purchased property : A West African (Mande and/or Bantu) etymology has been argued in scholarly sources, tracing the word back to word
waw-kay or the
Mande (aka "Mandinke" or "Mandingo") phrase
o ke. David Dalby first made the claim that the particle
OK could have African origins in the 1969 Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture. His argument was reprinted in various newspaper articles between 1969 and 1971. This suggestion has also been mentioned by Joseph Holloway, who argued in the 1993 book
The African Heritage of American English (co-written with a retired missionary) that various West African languages have near-homophone discourse markers with meanings such as "yes indeed" or which serve as part of the
back-channeling repertoire. yet has since appeared in scholarly sources published by linguists and non-linguists alike.
Alternative etymologies A large number of origins have been proposed. Some of them are thought to fall into the category of
folk etymology and are proposed based merely on apparent similarity between
OK and one or another phrase in a foreign language with a similar meaning and sound. Some examples are: • A corruption from the speech of the large number of descendants of Scottish and
Ulster Scots (Scots-Irish) immigrants to North America, of the common Scots phrase
och aye ("oh yes"). • A borrowing of the
Greek phrase (), meaning "all good". ==Early history in print==