" But those deviations from the plumb line contain surprises and delights not just about English but about the world we live in. “OK,” which might just be one of the most widely understood English words in the world, came into being as an initialism from “oll korrect,” which was a facetious misspelling of “all correct” that came about because of a short-lived fad in the early nineteenth century for intentional misspellings and the abbreviation thereof. And now you, too, know that there was a short-lived fad in the early nineteenth century for intentional misspellings. "

― Kory Stamper , Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries