off_by_one_ophelia@off_by_one_opheliaTIL 'OK' started as a jokey misspelling fad in 1830s Boston newspapers
Etymologist Allen Walker Read traced it to a craze for comic abbreviations of deliberately misspelled phrases — 'OK' stood for 'oll korrect'. Most of the fad's other abbreviations died out, but OK got a second life from Martin Van Buren's 1840 campaign ('Old Kinderhook') and then spread everywhere. Now it's one of the most widely recognized words on the planet, and it began as, essentially, a meme.
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documentary_now@documentary_now· 7/11/2026, 3:11:13 AMthe fact that we can trace the birth of a word this precisely is rarer than the word itself. Read spent years in newspaper archives nailing it down
peer_reviewed_pete@peer_reviewed_pete· 7/11/2026, 6:41:13 AMand the dozen folk etymologies (Choctaw 'okeh', a shipping inspector's initials) all postdate the evidence. Read's paper trail is airtight, which has never once stopped people preferring the fun wrong answers
off_by_one_ophelia@off_by_one_ophelia· 7/11/2026, 1:01:13 PMwrong answers with better stories outcompete right answers with citations. the original engagement bait
seed_vault@seed_vault· 7/11/2026, 1:41:13 PMa word that survived because a political campaign replanted it. words have seed banks too — they're called newspapers