User:Jnestorius/Okay

OK, okay, or O.K. (also other spellings) is a colloquial English word. As an interjection, adjective, or adverb it means 'all right', 'fine' ("this is okay to send out"), often as a weaker contrast to 'good' ("the food was okay"). As a noun and verb it means 'assent' ("The boss okayed the purchase"). As a discourse particle, it has a variety of functions. OK has been borrowed into many other languages, especially as an interjection denoting agreement, sometimes with nativized spelling or pronunciation.

The generally accepted etymology of OK is twofold: that it originated in New England in the late 1830s as an abbreviation of oll korrect, a jocular misspelling of all correct, during a fad for such misspelled abbreviations; and that it was popularized throughout the United States during the 1840 presidential election, when Martin Van Buren adopted OK as a slogan, reinterpreted as "Old Kinderhook" after his birthplace. This etymology was developed by Allen Walker Read in 1963. A few scholars favor other etymologies, and many other spurious etymologies have been proposed both before and after 1963.

Read's etymology
Allen Walker Read published a series of six articles on OK in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964. The first stage in the history of "O.K." describes its use and mention in 1839 in newspapers in Boston and other U.S. cities. The second stage in the history of "O.K." describes its association with the 1840 Presidential election; in 1941 Read himself had suggested this as the origin of OK. Could Andrew Jackson spell? addresses the story that the "oll korrect" spelling was a blunder by Andrew Jackson. The folklore of "O.K." surveys other folk etymologies which had been proposed from the 1840s to the 1960s. Later stages in the history of "O.K." charts the spread in use of OK, and the broadening of its senses. Successive revisions in the explanation of "O.K." is a history of the efforts of Read and other scholars to find the word's etymology. Most subsequent etymologists and dictionaries have endorsed Read's conclusions.

Oll korrect
The use of "O.K." to represent "all correct" combined two contemporaneous American fads, one for initialisms and the other for comical misspellings. These were both part of a broader trend of "unrestrained linguistic play".

The craze for initialisms representing catchphrases began in Boston in the summer of 1838. Notable examples were O.F.M. for "Our First Men", n.g. for "no go", and many names of alcoholic drinks, such as g.c. for "gin cocktail" or m.j. for mint julep. Also attested are a.r. for "all right" and O.W. for "oll wright". In 1839, the craze reached New York City in summer and New Orleans in autumn.

The trend for comical misspellings was popularized in 1825–1830 by George W. Arnold, writing as "Joe Strickland". It would later be developed by "Josh Billings" and "Artemus Ward". In New York in 1839, misspelling was combined with initialisms, such as K.Y. for "no use" (="know yuse"), K.G. for "no go", and K.K.K. for "commit no nuisance". N.C. for "nuff ced" ("[e]nough said") is attested from 1840 in New York, and apparently survived in British slang till the twentieth century.

Read identified the earliest definite attestation of O.K. in print in the 23 March 1839 edition of the Boston Morning Post, in an editorial ascribed by Read to Charles Gordon Greene. It is about the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society (A.B.R.S), described by Read as a "sportive group" that held "high-spirited meetings", which was the subject of repartee between the Morning Post and The Providence Journal:


 * We said our brethren were going to New York in the Richmond, and they did go, as per Post of Thursday. The "Chairman of the Committee on Charity Lecture Bells", is one of the deputation, and perhaps if he should return to Boston, via Providence, he of the Journal, and his train-band, would have his "contribution box," et ceteras, o.k.—all correct—and cause the corks to fly, like sparks, upward.

Read gives a number of subsequent appearances in print, some glossed as "all correct", other unglossed:

Based on the journals where O.K. appeared, Read contends "Before the end of 1839, the interest in O.K., and use of it, had permeated three of the leading literary circles of the United States, that of the Anti-Bell-Ringing group of Boston, led by the witty Charles Gordon Greene, along with Edward Everett, Samuel Kettell, Joseph T. Buckingham, John Pickering, et al.; the New World group of New York, led by Park Benjamin, Rufus Griswold, and Horace Greeley; and the Knickerbocker group, led by the Gaylord Clark brothers [ Willis and Lewis], Fitz-Greene Halleck, Washington Irving, et al."

Old Kinderhook
In the 1840 presidential election, incumbent Martin Van Buren of the Democratic Party ran against William Henry Harrison of the Whig Party. The Tammany faction of the Democrats in New York organized the "Democratic O.K. Club", first recorded in an announcement in the New Era of 23 March 1840. 'O.K.' was widely reported as the slogan or "war cry" of the Democrats who attacked a Whig meeting at Masonic Hall on 27 March, and Tammany rowdies were called 'the "O.K.'s"' in Whig newspaper reports throughout the election campaign. Read contends that the Democrats consciously adopted the pre-existing catchphrase 'O.K.' and gave it a new meaning —a process now sometimes called backronyming— and that "old Kinderhook" was this new "cabalistic" meaning, from Van Buren's birthplace of Kinderhook, New York. "Old Kentuck" was a widely-used nickname for Henry Clay of Kentucky, and "Kinderhook" had been in continual use as a metonym for Van Buren since at least 1834. A notice in the Tammany-leaning New Era on 27 May 1840 ran: "JACKSON BREAST PIN.–We acknowledge the receipt of a very pretty gold Pin, representing the "old white hat with a crape" such as is worn by the hero of New Orleans, and having upon it the (to the "Whigs") very frightful letters O.K., significant of the birthplace of Martin Van Buren, old Kinderhook, as also the rallying word of the Democracy of the late election, "all correct." It can be purchased at Mr. P. L. Fierty's, 486 Pearl Street. Those who wear them should bear in mind that it will require their most strenuous exertions between this and autumn, to make all things O.K."

Andrew Jackson was the hero of the Battle of New Orleans, progenitor of the Democratic party, and the President under whom Van Buren had served as Vice President.

Whig politicians had previously reclaimed the Democratic insults "hard cider" and "log cabin" and used them as slogans for Harrison; in a similar manner, they now attempted to turn the "O.K." slogan against the Democrats. On 30 March 1840, the New York Herald alleged the 'O.K.' slogan originated with Andrew Jackson writing "Ole Kurrek"; Jackson's lack of education had long been the target of jokes. Later Whig wags made reinterpretations of "O.K.", such as "Out of 'Kash'", "Out of 'Kredit'", "Out of Karacter'"; and reversed it to "K.O.", meaning "kicked out". This extra publicity turned what was meant as a secret code into a public phrase. "O.K." is mentioned in newspapers' election coverage throughout the United States during the election campaign. An 1840 hard times token shows a bust of Van Buren within the slogan "The sober second thoughts * of the people are . O . K *". In the 1844 presidential election, supporters of Henry Clay used "Old Kentuck" and abbreviation "O.K." in campaign materials.

The "oll korrect" interpretation of "O.K." remained in use, both in the electoral repartee and in other contexts. An April 1840 description of the group name "O. K.'s" as "flat burglary" was seen by Woodford Heflin as evidence that the Democratic O.K. was adapted from a pre-existing usage. Read contends that, although not the origin of O.K., the Democrats' electoral slogan was "overwhelmingly important" as a "booster shot" in its spread. The belief that "Old Kinderhook" was the origin of OK remains widespread. In his "On Language" column in 1982, William Safire, mentioning Allen Walker Read, wrote "the etymologist who tracked down the source of O.K. (Oll korrect, not Old Kinderhook — stop writing me about this. O.K.?)"

Appraisal
Dictionaries and etymologists generally cite Read's evidence, sometimes with a modicum of reservation, and reject alternatives as lacking any supporting documentary evidence.

Read himself admitted to a number of "loose ends" in his account. There are very few explicit attestations of "all correct" as a slang equivalent to "all right", or of "Old Kinderhook" as the expansion of "O.K." An 1840 newspaper in Peru, Illinois alleges the craze for "sportive" initialisms (which Read dates to 1838 in Boston) originated in 1835 in 'the "transmontain" country' —what is now the Midwest— and was common in Chicago in 1836. Read speculates it might have been spread by gamblers on Mississippi steamboats. He also suggests "O.K." in the 1840 quote "The net proceeds was upward of $1,200, O.K." might stand for "all clear" rather than "all correct".

The Oxford English Dictionary has separate headwords for the 1840 election slogan and the current word. The former is marked "Now hist. and rare.", and its etymology is given as "< the initial letters of Old Kinderhook, the nickname of Martin Van Buren". The latter's etymology is "Apparently < the initial letters of oll (or orl) korrect". This is further elaborated:
 * From the detailed evidence provided by A. W. Read it seems clear that O.K. first appeared in 1839 (an instance of a contemporary vogue for humorous abbreviations of this type), and that in 1840 it became greatly reinforced by association with [the 1840 election slogan]. Other suggestions ... all lack any form of acceptable documentation."

The account of OK in The Merriam-Webster new book of word histories begins "the origin of OK is shrouded in mystery". It recapitulates Read's evidence, saying it is "rather likely that Old Kinderhook was selected with an eye to the currently popular OK"; and finishes "This is what we know of OK so far ... Professor Read seems rather to expect earlier evidence to be unearthed." The first printing of Merriam-Webster's 1961 Third New International Dictionary cited Read's 1941 "Old Kinderhook" theory; after his 1963 papers, the "oll korrect" theory was cited instead.

Frederic G. Cassidy, founder of the Dictionary of American Regional English, said in 1981, "Unless or until something more plausible can be established, I think we have to accept Read's explanation." In The Cambridge History of the English Language, he states "The origin of OK, subject of many guesses and much debate, is now at last certainly established (Read 1963, 1964). It is the jocular offspring of popular journalism, fostered by political ballyhoo." Read is supported in the same volume by John Algeo and Richard W. Bailey.

The Historical Dictionary of American Slang similarly cites Read's thesis, and says that "derivational claims" from other languages are "gratuitous" without "concrete evidence of a prior and established English borrowing". Read's etymology is endorsed by the American Heritage Dictionary, Anatoly Liberman, Jonathon Green, Michael Quinion, David Barnhart and Allan A. Metcalf, Erin McKean, Barry Popik, and The Straight Dope.

The Encarta Dictionary describes Read's theory as "the one most widely accepted". Webster's New World College Dictionary citing the 1839 date, says 'as if abbrev. for "oll korrect," facetious misspelling of all correct'; then speculates that this is an alteration of Scots och aye. The Chambers Dictionary says "evidence suggests" Read's theory is correct.

Other etymologies
Many etymologies have been proposed over the decades. Frederic G. Cassidy says most are "obviously preposterous, offered to the newspapers by members of the public who apparently have not the faintest notion of how an etymology is established or of what makes a proposal deserve serious consideration". Some of the alternative etymologies involve Andrew Jackson; Read traces these back to the 1840 New York Herald story, but wonders if such stories had been circulating before then. A Bibliography of English Etymology lists 84 discussions of OK published in books and journals between 1866 and 2001.

An 1885 proposal that OK derived from the Choctaw okeh (now spelled -okii) was favored by many scholars till Read's 1941 paper, and by some after then. A 1969 proposal that it derives from Wolof waw-kay has attracted support from African American studies scholars.

Michael Adams suggests "The influence of Choctaw, African American speech, political speech — all of that came together in a kind of melting pot. There is a sense that the newspaper started it, but all those other influences came together to make OK probably the most popular American English word."

Putative antedatings
Read himself agreed that, if credible documentary evidence emerged of the use in English of a word similar to "O.K." in meaning and sound, at a significantly earlier date, "it will establish a stage of O.K. even earlier than that given in the present study". A number of documents have been cited as potential instances of such an antedating, although none has achieved widespread credibility.

Albert Matthews in 1942 listed several putative pre-1840 instances of O.K., all of which he dismissed. Of those from Elizabethan England, Matthews states "it is not likely that the most enthusiastic American will assert that they had the same sense as our 'O.K.'":
 * 1565, "At the end of the will of Thomas Cumberland, lorimer, of London, dated 8 Dec., 1565, entered in the Archdeaconry Court registers at iii. 173 b, occur the letters O. K. in capitals."
 * 1593, in Gabriel Harvey's Pierces Supererogation or A New Praise of the Olde Ass: "Be Martin a Martin Guerra; Browne a browne-bill; Bar∣row a wheelbarrow; Kett a kight; H. N. an O. K"
 * Harvey's words were repeated almost verbatim in Thomas Nashe's 1596 response, Have With You To Saffron Walden, or Gabriel Harvey's Hunt Is Up:
 * "H. N." denotes Henry Nicholis.; the other radical Protestants named are Martin Marprelate, Robert Browne, Henry Barrowe, and Francis Kett. Merriam-Webster says "No one has figured out what this O.K. stands for, but it is clearly a noun and not the American OK."

Four later candidates are American:
 * 1757, "A Muster Roll of Lieut. David Black's Company" in the Massachusetts archives ends with "A True Roll Att David Black". "Att", standing for "attests" or "attestor", was misread as "OK" by Sumner G. Wood in a 1909 paper and 1928 book.
 * 1790, purportedly by Andrew Jackson: a misreading of "O.R." ("Order Registered"), discussed below
 * 1815, by William Richardson, discussed below
 * 1828, the date in Richard H. Thornton's 1912 American Glossary of a citation from Peter Hardeman Burnett's Recollections. Although Burnett was recalling the 1828 election, he was writing in 1860 or later.

David Dalby's 1969 Africanist proposal cites several pre-1840 reports of the speech of black slaves; others dispute whether the words quoted are related to OK.

1790, Andrew Jackson
In 1859, Albigence Waldo Putnam, a historian in Tennessee, discovered a court record from Sumner County relating to a slave purchase proved by future President Andrew Jackson, which Putnam published as:
 * Wednesday, 6th Oct., 1790: Court met according to adjournment. Andrew Jackson, Esq., proved a bill of sale from Hugh McGary to Gasper Mansker for a negro man, which was O.K."

This was cited by James Parton in his 1860 biography of Jackson as a "common Western mistake for O.R., which means order recorded". In 1941, Woodford Heflin viewed the original document in Gallatin, Tennessee, and found the actual text read:
 * ... Andrew Jackson, Esqr. proved a bill of Sale from Hugh McGary to Kasper Mansker for a negro man which is O.R.

and that it was written by Daniel Smith, a clerk of the court, rather than Jackson, who was a lawyer (whence Esqr).

1815, William Richardson
In 1815, William Richardson travelled overland from Boston to New Orleans, keeping a diary of the journey. In 1938, the Valve Pilot Corporation published a printed edition of the diary as a Christmas gift for valued customers. The entry for 15 February 1815 read:
 * Arrived at Princeton, a handsome little village, o. k. and at Trenton where we dined at 1 P. M.

Scholars were interested by this alleged use of "o. k." 25 years earlier than the oldest example then known. The original manuscript has somewhat different wording, as well as crossed out and inserted text. Woodford Heflin investigated, as he was working on the entry for O.K. in the Dictionary of American English (DAE). In a 1941 paper, he transcribed the sentence as:
 * Arrived at Princeton a handsome little village, 15 miles from N Brunswick, ok & at Trenton, where we dined at 1 P. M.

After examining the crossed-out and later text, Heflin and Mary Charlotte Lane decided it had originally read:
 * We this day dined in Princeton, a handsome little village, 15 miles from N Brunswick, & arrived

before Richardson altered the text upon realizing he had dined in Trenton rather than Princeton. Heflin further argues that the "ok" in the sentence is a genuine use, in a sense synonymous with that of "all well" used in the previous day's entry, "we traveled on to N. York where we arrived all well, at 7 P. M."

H. L. Mencken supported the o.k. interpretation "on first glance" but came to doubt it "on reflection". Alan Walker Read, in a 1941 editor's note commented "So far as the form of the marks is concerned they could be 'o k, ' and without doubt they are contemporaneous and not inserted later; but this is far from saying that they have the present-day meaning". He offers a tentative counter-hypothesis that the letters might be "a h" rather than "o k", from an aborted repetition of "a handsome little village". In a 1942 response to Heflin's paper, Albert Matthews disagreed in particular with the details of the analogy between "all well" and "ok" While Heflin had worked from photostats of the manuscript, Read and Frederic G. Cassidy located the original and examined "greatly enlarged photographs" of it, becoming convinced it did not represent O.K.

The Oxford English Dictionary's entry for OK, revised in 2009, does not include the Richardson sentence in its citation list, but it is given in the etymology section prefaced "It is not clear whether the ok of the following quotation represents the same expression". Heflin had intended that the DAE's entry for O.K. would include the sentence in its list of quotations, but enclosed in square brackets because of its dubiety. Read complained that it should be further relegated to a list of excluded citations. Heflin further disagreed with Read's 1941 theory that "Old Kinderhook" was the origin of O.K.. Editor James Root Hulbert eventually sided with Read. When Heflin recalled the DAE controversy in 1962, he made no reference to the 1815 Richardson quotation, an omission Read called "rewriting history with a vengeance".

African languages
David Dalby, reader in West African languages at SOAS in London, gave the 1969 Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture, in which he proposed that various colloquial and slang American words originated in African languages spoken by black slaves. He summarized this in an article in The Times. The words included OK; guy ("person"); jive; hip and hippy; cat ("person"); dig ("understand"); sock ("strike"); bug ("enthusiast"); honkie; Sambo; fuzzy ("range horse","sure bet"); cush (corn-meal); jam (music); and uh-huh and uh-uh ("yes" and "no"). For each, he identified expressions in Wolof or Mandingo with similar sound and related sense. For OK, he proposed Wolof waw kay, a sequence of waw ("yes") and kay, an emphatic particle, which "would have required only a slight change of pronunciation (by analogy with the letters O and K) to have produced the modern American word."

Dalby alluded to the earlier research of Lorenzo Dow Turner, who showed in the 1940s that the Gullah language of the coastal South was an English creole with many African features. Dalby suggested the influential status of Wolof derived from the fact that Wolof-speakers were among the earliest slave populations in North America, who were subsequently often used as mariners and interpreters, and whose language was a lingua franca for other slaves. Folklorist Alan Dundes, introducing a reprint of Dalby's 1969 article, says "It does seem incredible that single language, Wolof, should have been the sole source for so many important slang terms. ... The reader should probably be urged to keep in mind that even if a number of Dalby's projected etymologies/parallels should ultimately prove to be completely wrong, there is still the possibility that he may be right about some of them."

In further articles in 1971 and 1972, Dalby lists eighty English words with proposed African sources, including multiple sources for OK. Most are based on a word for "yes" followed by an emphatic particle similar to kay: Wolof waw kay, Dogon o-kay, Djabo o-ke, and Western Fula eei kay (all meaning "yes, indeed!" ); Mandingo o-ke (meaning "yes, indeed!", "that's it", or "all right". ). He also lists Mandingo o-ke-len; literally "that being done", but often used as a discourse connective. He notes quotes of kay or ki "in the sense of O.K." in representations of U.S. black speech from 1776. He suggests the post-1839 attestations of OK in print coincide with increased northward migration of blacks fleeing slavery, and that contemporary "all correct" glosses were merely "an attempt to account for an expression which had no other obvious source".

As well as the controversial Richardson OK of 1815, Dalby cites a slave quoted in Jamaican planter's diary from 1816:
 * "Oh, ki, massa, doctor no need be fright, we no want to hurt him."

Frederic G. Cassidy says this example is not connected to OK, but rather an instances of ki or kie, an "exclamation of surprise, amusement, satisfaction, etc." noted by him in Jamaican Patois and by Lorenzo Dow Turner in Gullah. Of the more general Wolof/Mandingo hypothesis, Cassidy says "The most one can possibly concede is that IF Blacks in America were using the Mandingo or Wolof phrases among themselves, those phrases could have concurred or converged with OK when it became current in 1839 and thereafter in general American usage." Merriam-Webster's editors have said "If you take into account the pronunciation and meaning, you'll see that it does not fit 'okay' either semantically or phonetically."

Cassidy, and James L. Rader of Merriam-Webster, are skeptical of Dalby's general theory, and suggest that Afrocentrist wishful thinking has masked a lack of objective evidence for the putative African etymologies. Jesse Sheidlower also rejects many of Dalby's etymologies. Nigerian academic Farooq Kperogi is also skeptical, commmenting "it isn’t Africa that isn’t sharing its words; it’s the English language that isn’t accepting Africa’s words". Jacqueline Simpson's 1973 revision of Eric Partridge's slang dictionary supports Dalby's theory for OK; Terry Victor and Tom Dalzell's 2006 edition supports Read's theory. Peter Trudgill has written that OK is "almost certainly" of West African origin.

In African American studies, Dalby's work was supported by Philip D. Curtin; his specific work on OK has been endorsed by J. L. Dillard, John R. Rickford, Molefi Kete Asante, Joseph E. Holloway, the Encyclopedia of African-American culture and history, and A Pan-African encyclopedia. Holloway states that Wolofs were often house slaves or artisans, who would have had greater linguistic contact with the English-speaking household than field slaves.

Choctaw
In 1885, it was first proposed by William Wyman that OK derived from the Choctaw language okeh.

Choctaw is agglutinative, with verbs taking many suffixes, one of which is pronounced ( is a word-final allophone of ). This is spelled -okii in modern orthography, and okeh or oke in John Pickering's 1818 orthography, used by Cyrus Byington. Broadwell variously decribes -okii as an emphatic evidential or as an exclamatory illocution, and glosses it "indeed", "exhort[ation]", "emph[atic]", "excl[amation]". An 1870 edition of Byington's Choctaw grammar treats of what he calls the "article pronouns or post-positive particles", which "do not always admit of a translation". The combination of the definite pronoun ok and the distinctive pronoun eh gives okeh, "a distinctive and absolute predicate". This gives a "distinctive affirmation, it is so and not otherwise".

Wyman presented his account of O.K. in The Magazine of American History in 1885. He explained that Choctaw oke sounded exactly like English O.K., and its meaning approximated "That is true" or "That is all so". He goes on to say:
 * To General Andrew Jackson is attributed the introduction of the Choctaw word into our Anglo-American speech. Before the war of 1812, in voyages up and down the Mississippi and in trading expeditions overland from Nashville, Tenn., to Natchez, Miss., through the Choctaw Nation, he was brought into frequent communication with the Choctaws.
 * General Jackson, as everybody knows, was prone to the use of downright and energetic methods of assertion. Hearing  this emphatic oke so frequently uttered  by the Choctaw people, he learned the meaning conveyed by it to the Choctaw mind, and appropriated it, out of hand, to his own purposes. From him it passed  over to the multitude. This account of the origin of O. K. has been current in  the South for many years. If not true, it is, to so say the least, ben trovato.

Wyman goes on to discount the story that Jackson had misspelled "oll korrect", and suggests the 1790 Sumner County record was a deliberate affectation by Jackson rather than a misspelling. In an 1894 version of his theory, Wyman states:
 * There is a tradition among the intelligent Choctaws of the old stock who once lived in Mississippi that General Jackson borrowed the expression O. K. from the Choctaw language. The Choctaws and the Chickasaws speak the same tongue. In the language of these two peoples there is no copulative verb that corresponds to "be" in English (esse in Latin). A substitute for this is found in the emphatic word okéh, which ends every assertion in Choctaw. ... General Jackson was frequently among the Choctaws and Chickasaws before he became famous. He must have heard this expression often. He probably adopted it in early life as a very expressive kind of slang, and used it after he became President as a private symbol (O. K.) to indicate approval. ... This theory of the origin of O. K. is, if not true, at least well invented, as the Italians say.

Wyman cites bobashilly (sic; usu. bobbasheely) and bayou as other English words of Choctaw origin.

A variant story was provided by William H. Murray in 1931, that Jackson derived OK from '"si Hoka", meaning "that's me" or "that's what I said"', used frequently by Pushmataha, a Choctaw chief who fought under Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans and the Battle of Horseshoe Bend.

Charles P. G. Scott (1853–1936), etymologist for the Century Dictionary, favored an origin for OK in Mobilian Jargon, a lingua franca based largely on Choctaw which was used by Indians at the time of early white settlement of the inner Deep South. The 1909 and 1927 editions of the Century Dictionary gave Choctaw okeh as the origin of OK; Merriam–Webster's dictionaries did so from 1890 to 1961. Eric Partridge favoured the Choctaw theory until Read's 1941 paper on "Old Kinderhook".

President Woodrow Wilson was reported to approve documents with okeh rather than O.K. in endorsement of the Choctaw etymology. Wilson's use popularized okeh as an English spelling after 1918. When Okeh Records was established that year, its publicity stated "This name is derived from the original Indian spelling of the term colloquially known as O.K., standing for 'all right'" — although OKEH was also the initials of founder Otto K. E. Heinemann. In 1960, Pete Seeger wrote "All Mixed Up", a pean to the melting pot. It contains the line 'Choctaw gave us the word "okay"'. A 1971 PhD dissertation on Mississippi Choctaw gives reasons why the language might be the source of OK:
 * One is that the lingua franca built on Choctaw could have easily contained this word and spread its usage over a wide area. The other is the prevalence of okeh in Choctaw speech.  It was amusing to note the occurrence of okeh in Choctaw conversations in much the same syntactic and semantic environments as the American OK occurs.  If OK came out of the American back woods as suggested by Pyles, then Choctaw would be a sensible source.

America
Some sources, including Allan Metcalf and H.L. Mencken, have contended that O.K. was rarely used between the end of the 1840 election campaign and its revival in the late nineteenth century. Read disputes this, citing published work and private journals and letters from the 1840s and 1850s. O.K. does not appear in the published works of Mark Twain, although he used it in letters of 1872 and 1876.

In the 1845 play Fashion by Anna Cora Mowatt, the line "O.K., all correct." is delivered by Snobson, "a rare species of confidential clerk".

"The O.K." was a prestigious Harvard student society from 1859 to 1917, associated with Charles Sanders Peirce. It had a tradition of inventing etymologies for the expression O.K. The significance of its own initials was a secret, discovered in 1979 to be "Orthoepy Klub".

"James Pyle's O.K. Soap" was advertised in The New York Times from 1862. In 1900, Pyle's obituary in that paper was subtitled 'Brought "O. K." Into Popularity', and stated: 'He was the first to utilize in advertisements the letters "O K" in their business significance of " all correct." He had read the version of the origin of the use of these letters by Stonewall Jackson as an indorsement, and was struck by their catchiness. By his extensive employment of them he probably did more than any other person to raise them to the dignity of a popular term and an established business institution.'

H. L. Mencken suggested the American Civil War, with the mixing of people from different regions, would have exposed many to O.K. for the first time.

In 1875, Benjamin Edward Woolf's hit play The Mighty Dollar made comic use of initialisms, including the first attestation of P.D.Q. for "pretty darn quick". While some recalled O.K. for "all correct" as among its funny phrases, a prompter's copy of the text discovered in 1943 has K.K for "quite correct".

O.K. was slang of lawyers and accountants by the 1860s; an 1859 guide to buying a farm advises, regarding title, "You may be assured it is "O. K." (all correct); but we advise you to go and judge for yourself." By the 1880s, O.K. was being used as a noun and verb to refer to the initials O.K. written on a commercial document to indicate its acceptance.

In the 1890s, "O.K." appears in The Bicyclers by John Kendrick Bangs and Edward Noyes Westcott's David Harum.

T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) said in a 1953 address at Washington University in St. Louis:
 * Words can even disappear, and come into currency again after a period of seclusion. When I was a small boy, in this city, I was reproved by my family for using the vulgar phrase 'O.K.'. Then there was a period during which it seemed to have expired; but at some subsequent date it came to life again, and twenty-odd years ago swept like a tidal wave over England, to establish itself in English speech. As for its respectability here, I hold the most convincing piece of evidence yet : it occurs in a cable I received from Professor Cardwell [Guy Adams Cardwell, Professor of English at Washington University].

Britain
The earliest attested use of "O.K." in Britain is from Samuel Beeton's Boy's Own Magazine in 1864. However, it is mentioned as an Americanism in several 1859 works,  and Mowatt's Fashion played in London in 1850. Allen Walker Read speculates that Charles Farrar Browne may have used 'O.K.' in his successful lecture tour of England in 1866. Alfred Vance, a music hall comedian, had a famous song in 1869 called "Walking in the Zoo", whose chorus ended "The O.K. thing on Sunday is the walking in the Zoo." As a rival to A.1. Sauce, George Mason introduced "O K" Sauce and Relish by 1884, with other "O.K."-branded foodstuffs following.

After World War I the word became common in Britain, but still attracted some opprobrium as an Americanism until World War II. In 1935, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London ruled on a commercial dispute in the province of Burma as to the meaning of O.K. as written on orders and receipts. While describing O.K. as a "commercial barbarism", and noting the uncertainty over its etymology, the court accepted it as indicating that the details in the documents were correct. A leader in The Times commented, "what has been okayed by the Privy Council should be O.K. for all".

Other English-speaking regions
An 1882 letter to Notes and Queries suggests that a Chinese shopkeeper in Kingston, Jamaica had an "O.K." sign by 1848.

In 1856, the Melbourne Punch printed the "first draught" of a slang dictionary, "an etymological explanation of the new words introduced into the English, American, and Australian languages", including:
 * O. K.—Adj. Tu rights, proper, stunning, of the right sort, prime, all serene, all right, crummy, some, out-an-out, scrumtious, &c. This term is composed of the initials of the old English words, Orle Korrekt.

O.K. was familiar to a British Indian in 1883.

OK Bazaars, founded in Johannesburg in 1927, was by the 1930s the largest retail chain in South Africa.

In other languages
Okay has become an essentially global term, used today in most languages and most cultures around the world. It was common parlance among telegraphers and merchant seamen by 1900. The arrival of American G.I.s overseas during World War II helped popularize it further. G.I.s in Italy were dubbed Gli Ochei ("The Okays") by the locals.

Content word
OED:
 * adj
 * All correct, all right; satisfactory, good; well, in good health or order. In early use, occas. more intensively: outstanding, excellent. Now freq. in somewhat weakened sense: adequate, acceptable. OK by (someone): fine by (a person), acceptable to (a person). Chiefly predicative.
 * Fashionable, modish; prestigious, high-class.
 * Of a person: decent, trustworthy; congenial.
 * Appropriate, suitable; permissible, allowed. Freq. with for.
 * Of a person: comfortable, at ease, content, satisfied; reasonable, understanding. Usu. with about, with.
 * int
 * Expressing assent, concession, or approval, esp. with regard to a previous statement or question: yes, all right.
 * a. Appended as an interrogative to a clause, phrase, etc., in expectation of agreement or approval. b. Brit. ——rules OK!: asserting the pre-eminence of a specified person or thing.
 * Introducing an utterance or as a conversational filler, typically without affirmative or concessive force, but rather as a means of drawing attention to what the speaker is about to say: well, so, right.
 * n
 * An indication of approval; an endorsement, authorization. Freq. in to give the OK (to). In early use chiefly with reference to the marking of a document, etc., with the letters ‘OK’.
 * adv
 * Satisfactorily, acceptably.
 * v
 * trans. To endorse, esp. by marking with the letters ‘OK’; to approve, agree to, sanction, or pass. Freq. in pa. pple.

As an adjective, OK is used attributively ("this is an OK book") more rarely than predicatively ("This book is OK"). Attributive use is less rare in Britain, where it was popularized by Stephen Potter in the 1950s.

Discourse particle
"okay can fulfill functions at many level of discourse. At the ideational level it functions as an adjective or adverb (Bangerter and Clark, 2003), it signifies approval, acceptance and confirmation by the speaker (Condon, 1986; Merritt, 1984), and affirmatively responds to a question (Guthrie, 1997; Heisler, 1996). In this function it is frequently discussed as a third turn receipt by a current speaker (Bangerter and Clark, 2003; Guthrie, 1997; Beach, 1993). Okay has also been described as serving a variety of text-structural functions as a marker of information-state transitions. Several studies describe this function of okay, frequently, however, labeling the phenomenon differently (Levin and Gray, 1983; Merritt, 1984; Condon, 1986; Heisler, 1996; Rendle-Short, 2000; Swales and Malczewski, 2001; Bangerter and Clark, 2003). Several studies subdivide this structural type of okay, usually, however, these subdivisions refer to the place where structural okay occurs or to the type of new section it opens up. Okay functions as a pre-closing device (Schegloff and Sacks, 1973; Bangerter and Clark, 2003), it marks a return from a digression (Bangerter and Clark, 2003), functions as a text bracketing device (Rendle-Short, 2000), occurs in introductory or conclusion position (Levin and Gray, 1983), or as an attention getter at the beginning of an interaction (Heisler, 1996). Finally okay and alright are frequently mentioned in their function of backchannel signal (Heisler, 1996; Swales and Malczewski, 2001)."

The 1977 Tenerife airport disaster, in which 583 people were killed, was blamed in part on a misunderstanding between a pilot and air traffic control over the intended sense of the word "OK". While the controller meant "understood, stand by", the pilot may have interpreted it as "approved, proceed". Aviation English excludes "OK" precisely to avoid such ambiguities.

Spelling
Different style guides may favour the spelling OK, O.K., or okay (first attested in 1895 ). Large dictionaries list all these forms, ranked variously. The Choctaw-influeced okeh spelling is now practically obsolete. The Oxford English dictionary lists the

Variants
Mencken in 1949 said:
 * There was once a tendency, following Woodrow's high example, to write the word okey, okay, or okeh, but these seem to be going out of fashion. I also note, to my relief, a weakening of the whimsical forms oke, oky-doke, oky-doky, and oky-dory, the last probably a love child of O.K. and hunky-dory.

Gesture
In the United States and most of Europe the OK sign (name attested from 1951 ) is a related gesture is made by touching the index finger with the thumb (forming a rough circle) and raising of the remaining fingers (to form a 'K'). Similar gestures have other meanings in other cultures.

Computers
thumb|right|[[Facebook modal dialog using the spelling "Okay"]]

In graphical user interfaces (GUIs), OK is often the label on one of the buttons in modal dialog boxes such as error messages or print dialogs. If it is the only button, it simply indicates the user has read the message and the dialog can be closed. If there is also a Cancel button, the OK button indicates the user wishes to complete rather than cancel the relevant action. However, modern user interface guidelines prefer to avoid modal dialog boxes if possible, and use more specific verbs, such as Continue, to label their action buttons instead of the generic OK. When the word OK is used, it is usually spelled OK, rather than O.K., Okay, or Ok; however Facebook uses Okay.

The GUI OK button can probably be traced to research done for the Apple Lisa. Designers originally feared OK was too colloquial, and favoured "Do It"; but this looked too like "Dolt".

Before GUIs, OK or ok was already used in command-line interfaces, both as a system message to the user and a user response. This was often because the word is quick to type and, at a time when storage was extremely restricted, used only two words of memory.

PLATO normally responded to user input with ok or no.

On the Radio Shack TRS-80 Color Computer (1980), there was an "OK> prompt", which indicated that the Color Computer was ready to accept commands. This is also used in the OLPC XO-1 laptop OpenFirmware BIOS.

Many PCs from the 1990s performed a memory check during start-up. A counter showed the verified memory during the operation, sometimes suffixed with OK.

During the boot sequence of several Linux distributions, after attempting to start each service the result is shown as  or   as appropriate.

The Hypertext Transfer Protocol upon which the World Wide Web is based defines a successful response from the server is as OK with the numerical code 200. The Session Initiation Protocol also defines a response, 200 OK, which conveys success for most requests.

Some programming language interpreters such as BASIC and Forth print ok when ready to accept input from the keyboard.

Derivatives

 * I'm OK, You're OK, bestselling 1969 self-help book.
 * The O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, known for the 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral: owner John Montgomery named it after O.K.
 * Okay, Oklahoma (previously called Coretta, Falls City, Rex, and North Muskogee) was renamed in 1919 in honour of the "O. K. Trucks" manufactured locally from 1915 by the Oklahoma Auto Manufacturing Company,
 * The state abbreviation "OK" for Oklahoma was not introduced by the USPS till 1963. "Okla." is the traditional abbreviation, introduced in 1892. "Ok." is attested in 1890 for Oklahoma Territory. The chorus of "Oklahoma", the title song of the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, ends: "You're doin' fine, Oklahoma! Oklahoma - O.K." except that the final reprise ends: "You're doin' fine, Oklahoma! Oklahoma — O.K.L.A.H.O.M.A. — Oklahoma!'"
 * "O.K. Waltz", 1840
 * Oh, Kay!
 * "The Lumberjack Song": Monty Python song, beginning "I'm a Lumberjack and I'm OK"
 * "It's Not Right but It's Okay": Whitney Houston single
 * In the 1930s, "D.K." was the opposite of "O.K." in American stockbrokers' slang.