What does OK stand for?

oll korrect

Well from Wikipedia it has a history, but the way I see it is as an adjective and OK is just an abbreviation(Wiki agrees with what I said).

Pthephead-
Shouldn’t it be AC (All Correct) then?
Of course, AC stands for AstroChuck.

Well it kind of looks German but I thought I read it was something different, maybe not.

“The general fad may have existed in spoken or informal written American English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers. OK’s original presentation as “all correct” was later varied with spellings such as “Oll Korrect” or even “Ole Kurreck”. Deliberate word play was associated with the acronym fad and was a yet broader contemporary American fad.”

-Wikipedia

The Finnish word for “correct” is “oikea”... Might be something there

And is the Finnish word for “correct” translatable into Swedish as “ikea”, I wonder?

Who knew.

Isn’t it just an abbreviation from ‘okay’

it stand for all correct, it was fashionable to misspell on purpose. (google old kinderhook and look at the NPR listing… I won’t provide the link from my iPod)

Weird but yeah. It stands for All Correct.

so it sounds like “okay” comes from “OK”, instead of the other way around. “okay” is what “O.K.” sounds like.

Thanx. Especially Pete.

Turns out to be a good question, AC, because there is no single, correct answer. They really don’t know. There are only theories of which the misspelling of all correct is one. Here is what the experts at the Oxford Dictionaries say:

“There have been numerous attempts to explain the emergence of this curious colloquial expression, which seems to have swept into popular use in the US during the mid-19th century. Most of them are undoubtedly pure speculation. It does not seem at all likely, from the linguistic and historical evidence, that it derives from the Scots expression ‘och aye’, the Greek ola kala (‘it is good’), the Choctaw Indian oke or okeh (‘it is so’), the French aux Cayes (‘from Cayes’, a port in Haiti with a reputation for good rum) or au quai (‘to the quay’, as supposedly used by French-speaking dockers), or the initials of a railway freight agent called Obediah Kelly who is said to have written them on lading documents he had checked.

The oldest written references to ‘OK’ result from its adoption as a slogan by the Democratic party during the American Presidential election of 1840. Their candidate, President Martin Van Buren, was nicknamed ‘Old Kinderhook’ (after his birthplace in New York State), and his supporters formed the ‘OK Club’.

This undoubtedly helped to popularize the term (though it did not get President Van Buren re-elected!). During the late 1830s there had been a brief but widespread craze in the US for humorous misspellings, and the form orl korrekt which was among them could explain the initials ‘OK’. Such a theory has been supported by more than one distinguished American scholar, and is given in many dictionaries, including Oxford dictionaries.

The only other theory with at least a degree of plausibility is that the term originated among Black slaves of West African origin, and represents a word meaning ‘all right, yes indeed’ in various West African languages. Unfortunately, historical evidence enabling the origin of this expression to be finally and firmly established may be hard to unearth.”

Oklahoma!

You guys… well lol someone said Oklahoma, I was going to say that, but you guys, common know get your history on the subject right!

OK came from the OK Corral, I can’t remember who coined the term, but someone else coined the term afterwords as Okay (everything is alright), and Okie Dokie.

I wish I could remember the names of those people, but that’s what it came from.

It’s still a relatively new name, it hasn’t been around for very long.

I don’t think so, XCNuse. Sources?

I wish I could remember, I want to say discovery channel or science channel one or the other.

that’s just one way though, there’s tons of people out there that say it comes from Africans with Olla Kalla or from president Martin Van Buren back in the 1840s

I guess in the end you could say that no one really knows where its origins are truly from

@XCNuse Uh, right. Did you read my post above?

I heard somewhere that OK, stood for Zero Kill (0K) during the WWII. Was it right or not, i don’t know. Marina’s explanations seemed right too many possibilities. Have anyone heard about zero Kill ?

@djyle I cannot find definitive sourcing for 0K as a possible origin, but we get so many terms from military speak that I would certainly be open to that as a possible explanation the equal of any of the others offered except for one thing. The use of the term OK dates back to the 1800s.

P.S. Welcome to the collective!

surprise surprise, the OK Corral was in the middle of the 1800s….
and yes i saw your post.

oh kool or oh kay hahahahaha

googly, the term “cool” wasn’t around in the 1800s.

I think it spread from many different sources around the same time, like light bulbs were invented by a few different people at the same time.