"OK" started as a deliberately misspelled joke in 1839

“OK” may be the most successful joke in the history of English. Its first known appearance in print is March 23, 1839, in the Boston Morning Post, where editor Charles Gordon Greene used it as shorthand for “oll korrect” — a deliberate, jokey misspelling of “all correct.”

That was the gag of the moment. Educated young men in late-1830s Boston amused themselves by misspelling common phrases and then abbreviating them: “KY” for “know yuse” (no use), “OW” for “oll wright.” Almost all of these fads died. OK very nearly did too.

What saved it wasn’t wit. It was an election.

In 1840, supporters of President Martin Van Buren — nicknamed “Old Kinderhook” after his New York hometown — formed “OK Clubs” and rallied behind the slogan “Vote for OK.” The two-letter coincidence fused the newspaper joke to a national campaign, and the abbreviation stuck where it might otherwise have faded.

The origin stayed murky for over a century, spawning rival theories crediting Greek, Choctaw, and railroad clerks. It took Columbia University scholar Allen Walker Read, digging through archives in the mid-1960s, to nail the 1839 source and demolish the alternatives.

Today it travels almost everywhere, in countless languages — a pun nobody remembers making.