Q OK and taxi seem to be international words. What are their origins? - W Sewell, Bishop Auckland.

A THE word taxi is short for taximeter-cab which took its name from a German invention patented in Hamburg in 1890 called the Taxamater-Fabrik.

It was an automatic contrivance that recorded the distance travelled by a cab but could also calculate the fare. The device was widely used in Paris and Berlin by the end of the 19th century and was first experimented with in London in 1898, where it was known as the Berlin taxameter. Taxameter literally meant tax - meter or tarriff meter - a meter that calculates a fare.

In 1907 it was agreed that cab operators in London should generally adopt the system but there was some debate in England as to what the newly adopted cabs should be called. The name taximeter cab was used at first, but it wasn't the easiest phrase to say. Taxi cab was an obvious shortened form of this and taxi was a further, more convenient, shortening of the phrase. In 1908 a newspaper reported that taxi had become the popular name given to the new cabs, although the word was occasionally spelled taxy.

The word taxi has taken on other meanings over the years. It is occasionally used as a verb where the phrase to taxi may be used to describe taking a taxi. Planes can also taxi, when they move slowly along a runway. In American slang a taxi is the name given to a prison sentence of between five and fifteen years.

The origin of OK, or okay, is hotly debated. Dictionaries tend to agree that OK is short for orl korrect (all correct) since this is the context in which it is used in the Boston Morning Post of March 23, 1839 - the first known written evidence for the phrase.

Some authorities attribute the origin to the Democratic Presidential candidate Martin Van Buren who came from Kinderhook in New York State and was known as Old Kinderhook. In New York, the Democrats opened a club dedicated to him called the OK Club in March 1840. Other theories abound. In the Native American language of Choctaw, okeh means it is so. And in the Wolof language of Gambia okeh means yes and may have been imported into the United States during the slave trade era.

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