OK

OK, with spelling variations including okay, O.K. and [|many others], is an English word denoting approval, acceptance, agreement, assent, acknowledgment, or a sign of indifference. OK is frequently used as a loanword in other languages. It has been described as the most frequently spoken or written word on the planet.
The origin of OK is disputed; however, most modern reference works hold that it originated around Boston as part of a fad in the late 1830s of abbreviating misspellings – that it is an initialism of "oll korrect" as a misspelling of "all correct". This origin was first described by linguist Allen Walker Read in the 1960s.
As an adjective, OK principally means "adequate" or "acceptable" as a contrast to "bad" ; it can also mean "mediocre" when used in contrast with "good". It fulfills a similar role as an adverb. As an interjection, it can denote compliance, or agreement. It can mean "assent" when it is used as a noun or, more colloquially, as a verb. OK, as an adjective, can express acknowledgement without approval. As a versatile discourse marker or continuer, it can also be used with appropriate intonation to show doubt or to seek confirmation. Some of this variation in use and shape of the word is also found in other languages.

Etymologies

Many explanations for the origin of the expression have been suggested, but few have been discussed seriously by linguists. The following proposals have found mainstream recognition.

Boston abbreviation fad

The etymology that most reference works provide today is based on a survey of the word's early history in print: a series of six articles by Allen Walker Read in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964. He tracked the spread and evolution of the word in American newspapers and other written documents, and later throughout the rest of the world. He also documented controversy surrounding OK and the history of its folk etymologies, both of which are intertwined with the history of the word itself. Read argues that, at the time of the expression's first appearance in print, a broader fad existed in the United States of "comical misspellings" and of forming and employing acronyms, themselves based on colloquial speech patterns:
The general fad is speculated to have existed in spoken or informal written U.S. English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers. OKs original presentation as "all correct" was later varied with spellings such as "Oll Korrect" or even "Ole Kurreck".
The term appears to have achieved national prominence in 1840, when supporters of the Democratic political party claimed during the 1840 United States presidential election that it stood for "Old Kinderhook", a nickname for the Democratic president and candidate for reelection, Martin Van Buren, a native of Kinderhook, New York. "Vote for OK" was snappier than using his Dutch name. In response, Whig opponents attributed OK, in the sense of "Oll Korrect", to the bad spelling of Andrew Jackson, Van Buren's predecessor. The country-wide publicity surrounding the election appears to have been a critical event in OKs history, widely and suddenly popularizing it across the United States.
Allen Walker Read proposed an etymology of OK in "Old Kinderhook" in 1941. The evidence presented in that article was somewhat sparse, and the connection to "Oll Korrect" not fully elucidated. Various challenges to the etymology were presented; e.g., Heflin's 1962 article. However, Read's landmark 1963–1964 papers silenced most of the skepticism. Read's etymology gained immediate acceptance, and is now offered without reservation in most dictionaries. Read himself was nevertheless open to evaluating alternative explanations:

Choctaw

In "All Mixed Up", the folk singer Pete Seeger sang that OK was of Choctaw origin, as the dictionaries of the time tended to agree. Three major American reference works cited this etymology as the probable origin until as late as 1961.
The earliest written evidence for the Choctaw origin is provided in work by the Christian missionaries Cyrus Byington and Alfred Wright in 1825. These missionaries ended many sentences in their translation of the Bible with the particle "okeh", meaning "it is so", which was listed as an alternative spelling in the 1913 Webster's.
Byington's Dictionary of the Choctaw Language confirms the ubiquity of the "okeh" particle, and his Grammar of the Choctaw Language calls the particle -keh an "affirmative contradistinctive", with the "distinctive" o- prefix.
The Choctaw language was one of the languages spoken at this time in the Southeastern United States by a tribe with significant contact with African slaves. The major language of trade in this area, Mobilian Jargon, was based on Choctaw-Chickasaw, two Muskogean-family languages. This language was used, in particular, for communication with the slave-owning Cherokee. For the three decades prior to the Boston abbreviation fad, the Choctaw had been in extensive negotiation with the U.S. government, after having fought alongside them at the Battle of New Orleans.
Arguments for a more Southern origin for the word note the tendency of English to adopt loan words in language contact situations, as well as the ubiquity of the OK particle. Similar particles exist in native language groups distinct from Iroquoian.

West African

An early attestation of the particle 'kay' is found in a 1784 transcription of a North Carolina slave, who, seeking to avoid being flogged, explained being found asleep in the canoe he had been ordered to bring to a certain place to pick up a European exploring near his newly-purchased property :
A West African etymology has been argued in scholarly sources, tracing the word back to word waw-kay or the Mande phrase o ke.
David Dalby first made the claim that the particle OK could have African origins in the 1969 Hans Wolff Memorial Lecture. His argument was reprinted in various newspaper articles between 1969 and 1971. This suggestion has also been mentioned by Joseph Holloway, who argued in the 1993 book The African Heritage of American English that various West African languages have near-homophone discourse markers with meanings such as "yes indeed" or which serve as part of the back-channeling repertoire. Frederic Cassidy challenged Dalby's claims, asserting that there is no documentary evidence that any of these African-language words had any causal link with its use in the American press.
The West African hypothesis had not been accepted by 1981 by any etymologists, yet has since appeared in scholarly sources published by linguists and non-linguists alike.

Alternative etymologies

A large number of origins have been proposed. Some of them are thought to fall into the category of folk etymology and are proposed based merely on apparent similarity between OK and one or another phrase in a foreign language with a similar meaning and sound. Some examples are:

A corruption from the speech of the large number of descendants of Scottish and Ulster Scots immigrants to North America, of the common Scots phrase och aye.
A borrowing of the Greek phrase όλα καλά, meaning "all good".
Early history in print

identifies the earliest known use of O.K. in print as 1839, in the edition of 23 March of the Boston Morning Post. The announcement of a trip by the Anti-Bell-Ringing Society received attention from the Boston papers. Charles Gordon Greene wrote about the event using the line that is widely regarded as the first instance of this strain of OK, complete with gloss:
Read gives a number of subsequent appearances in print. Seven instances were accompanied with glosses that were variations on "all correct" such as "oll korrect" or "ole kurreck", but five appeared with no accompanying explanation, suggesting that the word was expected to be well known to readers and possibly in common colloquial use at the time.
Various claims of earlier usage have been made. For example, it was claimed that the phrase appeared in a 1790 court record from Sumner County, Tennessee, discovered in 1859 by a Tennessee historian named Albigence Waldo Putnam, in which Andrew Jackson apparently said "proved a bill of sale from Hugh McGary to Gasper Mansker, for a Negro man, which was O.K.". The lawyer who successfully argued many Indian rights claims, Felix S. Cohen, supported the Jacksonian popularization of the term based on its Choctaw origin:
David Dalby brought up a 1941 reference dating the term to 1815. The apparent notation "we arrived ok" appears in the hand-written diary of William Richardson traveling from Boston to New Orleans about a month after the Battle of New Orleans. However, Frederic Cassidy asserts that he personally tracked down this diary, writing:
Similarly, H. L. Mencken, who originally considered it "very clear that 'o. k.' is actually in the manuscript", later recanted his endorsement of the expression, asserting that it was used no earlier than 1839. Mencken described the diary entry as a misreading of the author's self-correction, and stated it was in reality the first two letters of the words a h before noticing the phrase had been used in the previous line and changing his mind.
Another example given by Dalby is a Jamaican planter's diary of 1816, which records a black slave saying "Oh ki, massa, doctor no need be fright, we no want to hurt him". Cassidy asserts that this is a misreading of the source, which actually begins "Oh, ki, massa...", where ki is a phrase by itself:

Variations

Whether this word is printed as OK, Ok, ok, okay, or O.K. is a matter normally resolved in the style manual for the publication involved. Dictionaries and style guides such as The Chicago Manual of Style and The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage provide no consensus. Whilst most variants have descended from the root "OK", "okay" predominates in edited English as it permits easier modification.
The spelling okeh was popularized in 1918 by President Woodrow Wilson, who wrote "Okeh W. W." on informal memoranda to indicate his approval. When this spelling confused his secretaries, Wilson said that he had found it in the latest edition of the Century Dictionary, which described O.K. as "a humorous or ignorant spelling of what should be okeh", citing Byington's Dictionary of the Choctaw Language. David Lawrence wrote an article about Wilson's usage of okeh for the Saturday Evening Post, published in the magazine's edition of May 4, 1918. By the end of that month, the obscure spelling had caught on; columnist Francis De Sales Ryan wrote on May 31 that "the now famous 'okeh,' President Wilson's word of approval, in good usage is certain to supersede the nonsensical form 'O. K.,'" although he noted that the Century Dictionary was in error and that the Choctaw word should actually be spelled oke. Ryan returned to the subject in 1955, telling the United Press International that he had researched the origin of OK and felt confident that it had been created by Van Buren's supporters in 1839. The spelling okeh remained popular for much of the 20th century, helped along by the success of Columbia's Okeh Records label, but virtually disappeared after the 1960s as further research into the word's origin was published and American dictionaries ceased to recommend the spelling.

Variation	Description
hokay	Used as an alternative.
k or kk or oka	Commonly used in instant messaging, or in SMS messages. Before the days of SMS, "K" was used as a Morse code prosign for "Go Ahead".
Okie dokie	This slang term was popularized in the film "The Little Rascals". Also with alternate spellings, including okeydoke. The phrase can be extended further, e.g. "Okie dokie pokie / smokie / artichokie / karaoke / lokie," etc.
A-OK	Variant attributed to Alan Shepard and the 1961 NASA launch of the Mercury mission.
M'kay	Slang term popularized by South Park TV show. Pronounced also as "Mmmm K". This variation has connotations of sarcasm, such as condescending disagreement.
Okily Dokily!	Catchphrase used by Ned Flanders in The Simpsons.
Oki or okii or okie	Humorous respellings of okay.