The History of "OK"

Welcome to the Grammar Minute, where we’re saving the English language sixty seconds at a time! I’m Lauren Smyth, and I’m back with another episode about the word “OK.” Trust me, this is more interesting than you think. This weird word is pretty obviously an abbreviation, but where does it come from? Nobody knows. But we can probably blame the folks of Boston in the 1830s, who had a newspaper fad of misspelling and then abbreviating words. Yeah, this generation isn’t the first one to come up with memes and slangy internet speak. Anyway, OK is thought to be an abbreviation of oll korrect, misspelled phonetically to start with o and k respectively. This was the only abbreviation that survived, but there were a number of others that I think we should bring back. These are NG (no go), SP (small potatoes), and OW (all right). Just in case you thought LOL was bad enough. That’s your Grammar Minute! Visit thegrammarminute.com for more tips and tricks.