Where the word OK actually came from. A bad joke from 1839 Boston. #TYSK #LanguageFacts

Añadido: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]A question for you. Do you know where the word okay actually came from? You probably use this probably 10 times a day or more than 10 times. Okay. Okay.

[00:00:07]Okay. Okay. Okay.

[00:00:09]Okay, let me explain. So, okay is the most spoken word in the entire world right now. It is used in almost every language on Earth. From Lagos to Tokyo, from Paris to São Paulo. When somebody wants to say things are fine, they simply just say okay. Even in places where people do not speak English at all, okay still works.

[00:00:25]But, this word actually started its life as a joke. In the late 1830s in the city of Boston, USA, there was a strange new trend going around in the local newspapers. The trend was very simple.

[00:00:34]Newspaper writers were misspelling common words on purpose just to be funny. They thought it was very clever humor at that time. For example, they would write no go for the word no go.

[00:00:42]They would write all rights for the word all right. It was all just bad punny stuff that got that got some laughs at the office. One of the misspellings that came out of this trend was all correct.

[00:00:53]So, all correct was just a deliberately wrong way of spelling all correct. And the short abbreviation of all correct was okay. On March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post officially became the first newspaper to print okay this exact way.

[00:01:07]The full credit for tracing this back to its origin goes to a Columbia University nominee. It goes to a Columbia University professor named Allen Walker Read. Read spent decades digging through old American newspapers in the 1960s to track this word's full journey. Now, most slang words die within a short time and that time just in the people's mind.

[00:01:25]You know, just like any trend, it goes up and then it it it naturally dies out.

[00:01:28]But then, politics happens. In the 1840, a man named Martin Van Buren was running for re-election as the president of the United States. Van Buren had a popular nickname at that time. He was called Old Kinderhook because he had been born in Kinderhook, a small village in New York.

[00:01:41]His political supporters across the country formed campaign support clubs to back his re-election bid. And they decided to call these clubs okay clubs in his honor. So, suddenly, you had two completely okay's in the mind of the public at that time. All correct from the newspaper joke, Old Kinderhook from the political campaign. So, the word okay just stuck in everybody's head like glue. It exploded into wider use very quickly. And funny enough, Van Buren actually lost the election in the end.

[00:02:04]But, okay survived him as a word. From there, the word okay spread to telegrams, where short form saved you money per word sent. Then it spread into business document, then it spread into military communication during wartime, then it spread to the radio, it spread to television everywhere, then it spread to the entire world. Today, the word okay might be the closest thing that humanity has to a true universal word.

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