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Two letters show up in nearly every language on Earth, spoken more often than almost any other word humans use, yet almost nobody can explain their real origin story.
In the 1830s, Boston newspapers were caught up in a bizarre editorial fad, where writers deliberately misspelled common phrases and shortened them into joke abbreviations for readers who were in on the gag.
On March 23, 1839, the Boston Morning Post printed a tongue-in-cheek abbreviation for 'oll korrect,' a deliberately misspelled version of 'all correct.'
That joke was part of a much larger craze of comic abbreviations, like 'KY' for 'know yuse' or 'NG' for 'no go,' most of which vanished from memory within a few years.
OK should have faded the same way, until it collided with presidential politics in 1840, when supporters of Martin Van Buren, nicknamed 'Old Kinderhook,' formed OK Clubs nationwide.
Linguist Allen Walker Read spent decades tracing the term through archives in the 1960s, proving this newspaper joke, not Native American, French, or German myths, was the true source.
That accidental joke eventually became the most recognized word on the planet, understood from Tokyo to Timbuktu, all because one Boston editor thought misspelling 'all correct' was funny.