WHY DO PEOPLE SAY O.K, OR Okay?

This has remained in my longest wonder, and I never did bother to find out. There’s a few possible source for this: It was used in the 1830s in a Boston newspaper as a joke. There was an humoristic fashion to reduce a phrase to initials, and sometimes the abbreviations were misspelled to add more humor. Someone used O.K. for “all correct” (oll korrect).

The previous explanation is connected with my favorite one, that says that during the Civil War, when batallions returned from the front, the first man in line carried a sign with the number of soldiers killed in action in that group. So the signs stated “9 Killed”, “5 killed” and so on. If the number was zero, they stated “O K”, a perfect mark.

The last one (somehow connected too), tells that during the glorious days of the telegraph, there was a man named Oscar Kent, who never commited mistakes in his transmissions. Then, if the telegraph message was signed “O.K.” all was correct.

Additionally, in German the expression “Ohne Korrekten” means “without correction” and in Greek “Ola Kala” means “everything’s fine”.

So, now we know!