A naval joke put “O.M.G.” on paper
In 1917, retired Royal Navy admiral John Fisher wrote to Winston Churchill, then serving in the British government, about a proposed new order of knighthood. Fisher thought the idea offered a ripe target for humor. In his letter, he abbreviated “Oh! My God!” as “O.M.G.”—using the initials as an exclamation of amused surprise.
The setting matters: this was not a text message or a casual online exchange. Fisher was writing a personal letter to a prominent political colleague, and the compact phrase worked as a quick, playful aside. Its punctuation—three separated capital letters—made it look more like a deliberately coined initialism than the familiar lowercase chat shorthand.
From private correspondence to everyday shorthand
Fisher’s letter shows that the expression existed in writing long before phones made short messages routine. But one early appearance does not establish that he invented it, or that the phrase was already widely used. It documents a particular moment when a writer turned a spoken-sounding exclamation into initials on the page.
Later, “OMG” became especially useful in electronic communication: three letters can convey surprise, delight, disbelief, or alarm without typing the full phrase. The technology gave the abbreviation a new setting and enormous visibility, but the underlying trick—compressing a familiar expression into initials—was already available to letter writers.
The amusing historical twist is that a phrase now associated with rapid-fire messages began, in this documented instance, as a wry flourish in a letter about honors and titles.
