okay: acceptable; adequate; indicating agreement or understanding

Okay (or OK, O.K., or o.k.) is a quintessential Americanism that now belongs to the world. Besides being a universal affirmative, it must be one of the most commonly spoken words in English. Few of us can get through the day without saying it a dozen or more times.

In common use since the midnineteenth century, okay has gathered an impressive collection of origin stories over the years. Although the true explanation came to light decades ago, spurious etymologies continue to circulate. Among the more common: the letters O.K. stand for Obediah Kelly, a railroad freight agent who signed bills of lading with his initials; they stand for Keokuk, chief of the Midwestern Sauk tribe, supposedly known as Old Keokuk, or O.K., to his friends; they derive from the Haitian port of Aux Cayes, pronounced "okay" (more or less), from which the best rum once shipped; okay comes from a similar-sounding word in Choctaw meaning 'it is so'; okay comes from a similar-sounding word in the West African language of Wolof meaning 'I agree'.

Perhaps the most frequently heard story attributes okay to President Andrew Jackson. According to proponents of this theory, Jackson was such a poor speller that he marked official papers with the notation "O.K." for "oll korrect." This slanderous tale is actually not true -- it was invented by Jackson’s political enemies shortly after okay became a popular expression. It does contain a grain of accuracy though. Okay really did originally stand for oll korrect.

Linguist Allen Walker Read, who spent years carefully perusing nineteenth-century newspapers to discover the earliest use of okay revealed his findings in a series of American Speech articles in 1963 and 1964. Read discovered an editorial fad, beginning in 1838, for using elaborate abbreviations in op-ed pieces. The abbreviating craze sprang up in Boston newspapers, but eventually spread to other cities. One early example comes from the Boston Morning Post for July 3, 1838: "Mr. Haughton . . . is a most obnoxious and unscrupulous individual in politics, but agreeable and gentlemanly in his private relations. G.t.d.h.d." [Give the devil his due.] Other typical examples include n.g. for "no go," s.p. for "small potatoes," and r.t.b.s. for "remains to be seen." Sometimes, the abbreviations stood for deliberate misspellings that were meant to suggest a comic dialect. A forerunner of o.k. was o.w. -- "oll wright." Another common one was k.y. for "know yuse."

O.k. made its first known appearance in print on March 23, 1839. The Morning Post editor, who was engaged in a bit of repartee with the editor of the Providence Journal, wrote, ". . . he of the Journal . . . would have the 'contribution box,' et ceteras, o.k. -- all correct . . ." Presumably the editor expected his readers to understand that o.k. stood for the joke spelling "oll korrect" even though he glossed it with a normal spelling.

O.k. undoubtedly would have disappeared in a few years, when the trend for abbreviations died out, but fate took a hand in the form of President Martin Van Buren. Van Buren was nicknamed "Old Kinderhook" after his birthplace of Kinderhook, New York. During his 1840 reelection campaign, his campaign managers took advantage of the coincidence of initials to adopt O.K. as a rallying cry. Democratic O.K. clubs were organized in support of Van Buren, a pretty okay president. This sales pitch ultimately didn't work -- William Henry Harrison was elected president -- but Van Buren Democrats kept okay alive until it could take permanent root in the vocabulary.

By the end of the nineteenth century, okay was being used as a single word. It can be a verb, a noun, an adverb, or an adjective. We can give someone the okay by saying say A-OK or okie dokie. G.I.'s during the second world war helped popularize the expression in Europe. Okay was reportedly one of only two or three English words known to former Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. Today it might be heard not only in Europe, but anywhere on the planet. That's more than okay.