When was ok invented

One thing is certain, OK is one of the most valuable English words at this time even if it has a history which is quite peculiar, to begin with. As you can see, it was a strange history for this word, but we did end up having one very useful word because of it! Daily Weekly. Next Article 25 Facts About Tsunamis. November 23, You may like also like. Timeward says:. November 24, at pm. Leave a Reply Cancel reply. Popular Posts. Latest Posts. Fact List Random Facts.

In an attempt at humor, young, educated elites deliberately misspelled words and abbreviated them for slang. OK reappeared in another Boston Morning Post article three days later, and it very slowly seeped into the American vernacular during The myth spread far and wide. Harrison won the election, but so did OK.

The expression started to appear in everyday speech, and in it showed up in the Slang Dictionary of Vulgar Words. Clever coinages may be laughed at and enjoyed, but hardly ever adopted by users of the language. Needless to say, neither of these found a permanent place in the language. But they provided the unusual context that enabled the creation of OK. On 23 March , OK was introduced to the world on the second page of the Boston Morning Post, in the midst of a long paragraph, as "o.

How this weak joke survived at all, instead of vanishing like its counterparts, is a matter of lucky coincidence involving the American presidential election of One candidate, Martin Van Buren, was nicknamed Old Kinderhook, and there was a false tale that a previous American president couldn't spell properly and thus would approve documents with an "OK", thinking it was the abbreviation for "all correct". Within a decade, people began actually marking OK on documents and using OK on the telegraph to signal that all was well.

So OK had found its niche, being easy to say or write and also distinctive enough to be clear. But there was still only restricted use of OK. The misspelled abbreviation may have implied illiteracy to some, and OK was generally avoided in anything but business contexts, or in fictional dialogue by characters deemed to be rustic or illiterate. Indeed, by and large American writers of fiction avoided OK altogether, even those like Mark Twain who freely used slang.

But in the 20th Century OK moved from margin to mainstream, gradually becoming a staple of nearly everyone's conversation, no longer looked on as illiterate or slang. Its true origin was gradually forgotten. OK used such familiar sounds that speakers of other languages, hearing it, could rethink it as an expression or abbreviation in their own language. Thus it was taken into the Choctaw Native American language, whose expression "okeh" meant something like "it is so". US President Woodrow Wilson, early in the 20th Century, lent his prestige by marking okeh on documents he approved.

And soon OK was to find its place in many languages as a reminder of a familiar word or abbreviation. But what makes OK so useful that we incorporate it into so many conversations?