The most frequently-used word on the planet
What two-letter word is the most frequently spoken or typed word on the planet? Let me give you a tiny hint: It was the first word spoken on the moon.
Go ahead... I’ll wait.
Got you stumped? Well, ok.
You still don’t know? I just told you—ok. That’s it, OK.
This simple two-letter word is spoken more than any other word on the planet, every day of the year, and used in many other cultures, other languages, and for various situations.
It anchors our agreements, confirms understandings, expresses how we are feeling at any given moment, and perhaps even encapsulates our whole view of life. We all say it, probably every day, numerous times, without thinking of just how important those two letters are, when in fact, OK is the most amazing invention in the history of American English.
If you were to record all of your conversations in one day, how many times do you think you would say OK? Probably more than you would guess. It’s hard to get through a conversation without a plentiful sprinkling of OK.
How do you properly spell OK? And is it a noun, verb, adjective, adverb or interjection? Is it even a word at all? Or is it an abbreviation for something else? For such a simple word, there seems to be a lot to consider, but how to spell it should not be one of those perplexing questions. But yet, OK has not one, but several spellings which just seems frivolous. Or ridiculous. The word has just one pronunciation — the names of the letters O and K. Since it just consists of those two letters of the alphabet, why shouldn’t there be just one spelling?
But, raise your hand if you’ve seen the word spelled “okay.” Or O.K., or o.k. Then there’s the “added space” version that looks like this: O. K., and o. k. Add them all up, and that makes six ways to spell OK. If you do any texting on your phone, you may have adopted the shorter, simpler “k” used when texting, and that makes seven. That’s just plain crazy!
I’m not even going to start on the “odd” spelling of the word “okay,” because the rules go all over the place. In a nutshell, the letter should be “c” instead of “k” since the vowel following it is an “a.” But I’m not going to open up that can of worms.
As if the various spellings isn’t bad enough, would you believe OK actually fits every one of the four major grammatical categories for parts of speech? Yes, this little two-letter wonder fits the mold as a noun, verb, adjective and adverb, as well as a wild-card category of interjection! Most often, it is an adjective, modifying a noun, except “when this OK becomes our everyday attitude.” Then it’s a noun, a “thing.” You’ve heard it used as a verb, when someone “OK’d the use of something.” And it shows off as an adverb when I say, “I took the vaccination OK, but it sure made my arm sore.” We probably use its wild card appearance as an interjection most of all, as in “OK, I give up!”
As to the birth of the greatest American expression of all time, that’s even more confusing, and I can’t possibly share the entire story. It first appeared in a newspaper on Saturday, March 23, 1839, when the editor of the Boston Morning Post, Charles Gordon Greene, remarked that something was “o. k.—all correct,” which left people wondering what he meant or whether it was simply a mispelling. However, within just a few months after its first use, other editors and writers began using “o. k.” to mean exactly what we know it to be, that something or someone is indeed “all correct.” But the thought that “o. k.” would be an abbreviation for “all correct,” when neither o nor k was used, has baffled elite wordsmiths for decades since.
So if you’re the kind of person who loves to celebrate special days, you should really designate March 23 as “OK Day.” You could greet everyone that day with “OK” instead of “Hello,” and send greeting cards with sentiments such as “I’m OK if you’re OK.” Personally, I would prefer some spiked punch and a platter of sugar cookies, decorated with the letters “OK” in frosting!
