The Boston Morning Post first records the…
March 1839 CE
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, in which he will tracked the spread and evolution of the word in American newspapers and other written documents, and later throughout the rest of the world.
He will also document controversy surrounding OK and the history of its folk etymologies, both of which are intertwined with the history of the word itself.
Read will argue 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 will be speculated to have existed in spoken or informal written U.S. English for a decade or more before its appearance in newspapers.
OK's original presentation as "all correct" will later be varied with spellings such as "Oll Korrect" or even "Ole Kurreck".
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