Q: Whence OMG?

“I work for New York Times Upfront, a mag­a­zine run by Scholas­tic Inc. and The New York Times for high school stu­dents. We hope you can ver­i­fy a recent piece of news. The Dai­ly Mail has pub­lished a let­ter writ­ten 9 Sep­tem­ber 1917, by Britain’s First Sea Lord, Admi­ral John Fish­er, to First Lord of the Admi­ral­ty Win­ston Churchill, where he first used the acronym OMG for “Oh My God.” As you know, OMG is a phrase often used in tex­ting, espe­cial­ly by teenagers! Is Fish­er the orig­i­na­tor, and is there a hand­writ­ten ver­sion of his let­ter to Churchill?” —A.P., New York, N.Y.

A: Yes, credit the Admiral

There’s no doubt that the OMG sto­ry is gen­uine, but we are not sure why the Dai­ly Mail thinks this is a dis­cov­ery. Lord Fish­er repro­duced the let­ter in his book, Mem­o­ries (Amer­i­can edi­tion, New York: Doran 1919) at page 77. The same let­ter was repro­duced by Admi­ral Bacon in his biog­ra­phy, Admi­ral of the Fleet Lord Fish­er (Lon­don: Hod­der & Stoughton,, 2 vols., 1929) II 194.

Fish­er had a flam­boy­ant writ­ing style, often sign­ing his let­ters to Churchill, “Yours till a cin­der” or “Yours till Hell freezes over.” Many oth­er oth­er loqua­cious salu­ta­tions made his lex­i­con of salu­bri­ous sign-offs. Giv­en his  sud­den res­ig­na­tion and dis­ap­pear­ance from the Admi­ral­ty in May 1915, they were rather less than sin­cere. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the Churchill Archives Cen­tre in Cam­bridge reports that they do not have a copy of the original.

I can­not track OMG or the spelled-out ver­sion to any­thing Churchill him­self said or wrote. As close as I can come is Roo­sevelt say­ing “Oh My God” over a sil­ly ques­tion at a press con­fer­ence. And Churchill’s best friend, Lord Birken­head (1872-1930) once cracked: “When Win­ston is right he is unique. When he is wrong, Oh My God!”

Bot­tom line: cred­it OMG to Jacky Fish­er, copy­right the Admi­ral­ty, 1914.

—Updat­ed from 2012

Further reading

“Train-Spot­ting: Churchill’s Rep­u­ta­tion in the First World War,” 2022.

Bar­ry Gough: “Great Con­tem­po­raries: ‘Bring Back Jacky Fish­er’,” in three parts, 2018.

Christo­pher Ster­ling and Richard Lang­worth, “Churchill and Fish­er (Or Char­lie Brown and the Foot­ball),” 2018.