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[5] in the journal American Speech in 1963 and 1964.[6][7][8][9][10][11][12] He tracked the spread and evolution of the word in American newspapers and other written documents, and later throughout the rest of the world. He also documented controversy surrounding OK and the history of its folk etymologies, both of which are intertwined with the history of the word itself. Read argues 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: