OK, a little thing to know..

O.K.

Although we use this word hundreds of times a week whether things are OK or not, we have probably rarely wondered about its history. That history is in fact a brief one, the word being first recorded in 1839, though it was no doubt in circulation before then. Much scholarship has been expended on the origins of OK, but Allen Walker Read has conclusively proved that OK is based on a sort of joke. Someone pronounced the phrase "all correct" as "oll (or "orl") correct", and the same person or someone else spelled it "oll korrect", which abbreviated gives us "OK".