It's a word so common that if you haven't already uttered it today, chances are you will — and probably more than once.

But unlike other common English words — like "I" or "who," which are some fifteen thousand years old — this particular word is a relative newcomer, and was coined right here in the Hub.

OK. So perhaps nothing is more emblematic of our digital age than the text message abbreviation, right? You know: LOL … BRB … WTF. But actually, if you ask language writer Allan Metcalf, of the American dialect society, that kind of thing is so 1830s.

"For some reason, the Boston newspapers — and in some other places but especially the Boston newspapers — thought it was just hilarious to have abbreviations," he said.

They had abbreviations for all sorts of things. Sometimes they were on the nose abbreviations for comedic phrases.

"OFM, for our first men," Metcalf said. "ABRS, for the anti-bell-ringing-society."

Others times they were abbreviations of deliberate misspellings for comic effect.

"OW for All Right," Metcalf said.

Amidst this abbreviation fad, on March 23, 1839, came a humorous article on the second page of the Boston Morning Post where writer and editor Charles Gordon Greene abbreviated the phrase “all correct” with two letters - OK.

"And of course readers were expected to join in the humorous notion or acknowledgement that OK is an abbreviation for all correct that is not correct, since 'all' does not begin with 'O' and 'correct' does not begin with 'K.'"

It was a little bit of wordplay that would take the world by storm.

"It happened because of newspapers," Metcalf said. "And one of the things that newspapers would do, they picked up things from other newspapers and that spread throughout the country quickly enough thanks to the newspaper exchange."

The term also got a surge in exposure during the 1940 Presidential election, when Martin Van Buren — also known as Old Kinderhook — running for the presidency, incorporated it in his campaign slogan: "Old Kinderhook is OK."

"They had OK clubs supporting Van Buren and soon in the 1840s OK spread all over," Metcalf said.

Now there are plenty of other alternative origin theories. That it comes from a greek phrase, "ola kala," meaning "all good," or a Choctaw Indian work spelled "okeh," meaning “it is so.” But Metcalf says that while some seem compelling, there is simply no hard evidence to support any of them.

"Of course its very hard to prove a negative," he said. "Somebody says, 'I’m sure there is something there or somebody could say 'I’m sure they were speaking it,' but there isn’t even the slightest hint."

As the 20th century dawned, the word continued to surge — and morph. People began spelling it “okay” to make it more word-like, created superlatives like A-OK, and variations like Okey Dokey, mmmkay, or the text-friendly, “K.” Today OK is regularly cited by linguists and writers as the world’s single most recognized word.

"If you’re talking with somebody and you don’t know that persons language, if that person knows 'OK,' which is rather likely, you can usually get a whole message across with nothing but 'OK' and various inflections of your voice and gestures," Metcalf said.

Metcalf is so enamored with this little expression that could, that he’s dubbed it America’s greatest word – in part, because he believes those two simple letters are an elegant expression of who we are.

"If something is OK for Americans then it’s working," he said. "You’ve succeeded with it. You can of course refine it, but it's good enough. OK allows you to say something positive for something that is less than perfect. I’m not a philosopher, but I argue that’s the American philosophy in two letters."

And what better place birthplace for America’s greatest word than right here in Boston, 176 years ago this week.

And if you have a tale of forgotten Massachusetts history to share, or there's something you're just plain curious about, email Edgar at curiositydesk@wgbh.org. He might just look into it for you.