okay

We found this in a book recently reviewed by some of our researchers.

"A vogue to create abbreviations broke out in the United States in the late 1830s. How this became fashionable, somewhat like slang, was studied and described in 1963-64 by the scholar Allen Walker Read in a series of articles in the journal 'Amercian Speech'. His greatest discovery was the origin of O.K., which started out as a jocular abbreviation, but became over time a nearly universal affirmative, used in many languages throughout the world. Professor Read traced the usage to the city of Boston, where in the late 1830s it became faddish to abbreviate certain common phrases, such as 'no go' or 'no good', which were rendered 'N.G.' and 'Our Men First' (meaning 'original settlers'), which was abbreviated O.F.M. The fad took a humourous turn when jocular misspellings of common phrases began to be abbreviated, leading to such forms as O.W. for 'oll wright' ("all wright"), K.Y. for 'know yuse' ("no use"), and O.K. for 'oll korrect' ("all correct"). While the other abbreviations vanished, O.K. achieved national currency in the name of the Democratic Party's "O.K. Club". This club was formed in New York City in 1840 to promote the reelection of President Martin Van Buren, and although the "O.K." in the club's name was actually an abbreviation of 'old kinderhook', a nickname of Van Buren's, whose birthplace was the village of Kinderhook, near Albany, N.Y., the abbreviation became firmly established in the sense of "all right" that is used today.

Postscript: 120 years later, in 1961, a group of astronauts on the Mercury Project popularized a fresh and more intensive variant of O.K. It was A-OK, meaning "excellent, perfect," and it was coined by blending a century-old adjective, A-one or A1, meaning "first class" with the equally old O.K. In effect, two old abbreviations were combined to create a new one. "

-"The Life of Language", p. 39