text: The history of the abbreviation OK is not what you'd expect. Some think that it comes from the Chocktaw affirmative okeh, or the Greek olla kalla, or others. The truth is that in the 1830's in New England, initialisms were the fad. Much like TGIF and FYI in modern times, in fact. The craze even went into generating letter combinations of intentional misspellings. Popular ones were "K.G." for "know go", "K.Y." for "know use", and "O.W." for "oll write". "O.K." naturally followed, standing for "oll korrect". O.K. is the only one that survived through the years. It's because of Martin Van Buren, elected our eighth president in 1836. He was born in Kinderhook, New York. Early in his political career, he was nicknamed "Old Kinderhook", which echoed the Oll Korrect initialism. OK became the rallying cry of the Old Kinderhook Club, a political organization supporting Van Buren during the 1840 campaign. The initials stuck as what H. L. Mencken described as "the most shining and sucessful Americanism ever invented".