There’s an apocryphal story, still in circulation, that the word OK was made up by President Andrew Jackson. According to the tale, Jackson used the letters when he was a major general in the War of 1812, marking his approval on papers with initials abbreviating the words oll korrect . “The Gen. was never good at spelling,” the Boston Atlas dryly concluded, recounting the story in August 1840. By that time Old Hickory, as Jackson was known, had served his eight years as president, and his successor, Martin Van Buren, was running for a second term. A native of Kinderhook, New York, Van Buren appealed to the Jacksonian vote with the nickname Old Kinderhook, using the initials O. K. as a political slogan. His Whig Party rivals sought, successfully, to turn his populist appeal into a liability by calling attention to Jackson’s alleged semiliteracy. By a sort of logical doggerel endemic in American politics, Old Kinderhook’s slogan became a symbol of his ignorance. The true origin of OK , as the American lexicographer Allen Walker Read skillfully uncovered in 1963, was much closer to the Atlas’s editorial offices. The letters did stand for oll korrect, but the spelling was no accident. The coinage almost certainly came from the waggish editor of the Boston Morning Post , Charles Gordon Greene, who was at the center of what Read characterizes as “a remarkable vogue of using abbreviations” beginning in the year 1838. The Morning Post was full of them, generally used with a touch of irony, as in the mock dignity of O.F.M. (our first men), or a fit of whimsy, as in the pure zaniness of G.T. (gone to Texas). It was only a matter of months before the fad turned to creative misspelling, a source of humor then as it was in Mark Twain’s time. There was N.C. (nuff said) and N.Y. (no yuse), as well as O.W. (oll wright). The first known appearance of OK followed that pattern.
