Even the word roundabout originally came from America, even though traffic circles hardly exist there. Perhaps the quintessential Americanism is OK (okay), which has become one of the best known and most widespread terms throughout the whole world. Its origins are somewhat obscure and still hotly debated, but it seems to have come into common usage in America during the 1830s. Many of these Americanisms were met with a certain amount of snobbery in Britain, and many words thought to be American in origin were vilified as uncouth and inferior by the British intelligentsia (even though many of those denigrated actually turned out to be of older English provenance in the first place).