'Ok' may be a commonly used word but experts have never been on the same page about its origin

People use a lot of words casually in everyday life and some may even end up meaning something entirely different based on the context or the way people from different generations use them. But while some words have been used commonly by people across the globe for decades, do people really know all about the origin of these words and the evolution of language?

For instance, the very origin of one of the most frequently used words 'ok' is disputed. While the word is literally used to express a sense of approval or to simply agree with something, linguistic experts never agreed on its origin. Some people say that it comes from the Native American Indian tribe known as the Choctaw since the word 'okeh' from their language is the same as the word 'okay' in English.

However, some believe this to be a sheer coincidence, and say that the word first appeared in the Boston Morning Post in the early 1830s. This origin story surfaced when  Allen Walker Read, a literary scholar at Columbia University, did his research in the 1960s and found that in the year 1939, New England or America was in the midst of "a remarkable vogue of using abbreviations."

The Boston Morning Post at the time was also part of the abbreviation race, with editor Charles Gordon at the helm. At the time, the paper was contributing to the abbreviation game with entries like  "SP" for “small potatoes” (similar to today’s "NBD" No Big Deal ) or "KG" for "Know Go."

Read then saw that the word OK was first seen in print on March 23, 1839, when Green used it as an abbreviation for "oll korrect," or "all correct," in a satirical article. While articles picked up the word, it wasn't until the following year that the word became commonly used. It happened when the supporters of Martin Van Buren, who was nicknamed "Old Kinderhook" after his hometown in New York, employed "Vote for OK" as a campaign slogan to set up OK clubs all in an effort to get votes. 

Later in 1941, David Dalby talked about the term used back in 1815 in a hand-written diary of William Richardson, who used the phrase "we arrived ok." However, later Frederic Cassidy, Linguist and lexicographer says, "Read and I at last discovered that it is owned by the grandson of the original writer, Professor L. Richardson, Jr., of the Department of Classical Studies at Duke University. Through his courtesy we were able to examine this manuscript carefully, to make greatly enlarged photographs of it, and to become convinced (as is Richardson) that, whatever the marks in the manuscript are, they are not OK," according to a Journal Article.

While Read's theories are famous and accepted by many, it has also been contested by other scholars. In the 1975 issue of American Speech, Frank Greco of Rockefeller University aid that the word had multiple origins, and talked about the word's early mentions in Scottish history as “och aye,” meaning “oh, yes” which changed over time to become OK. 

While the origin may not be something experts agree on, the word is surely popular with its variations seen in more than 37 languages and is also the most spoken word on the planet.