This answer elaborates on the earlier answer by SRS.
In the time before the concept of kinetic energy was clearly recognized there were two distinct concepts of 'quantity of motion' in circulation. For instance, Leibniz favored a quantity $mv^2$ as representing 'quantity of motion'. In elastic collisions the quantity of motion is conserved.
So that precursor to the concept of kinetic energy didn't have that factor $\frac{1}{2}$
$mv^2$ has the following property: if you look at a perfectly elastic collision between two particles then $mv^2$ for the two added together is the same before and after the collision. This holds good for any frame of reference. That is, you can look at the motion relative to the coordinate system in which the common center of mass is stationary, and obviously the quantity of motion is the same before and after the collision then, but it also holds good for any inertial coordinate system.
Later on physicists noticed more and more that in all kinds of energy conversions the total amount seems to be conserved.
For example, James Prescott Joule did experiments where a paddle wheel would churn water, driven by a string that ran over a pulley, being pulled down by a weight. The water was inside a calorimeter. Joule found that within the margin of achievable measuring accuracy the rise in temperature of the water was proportional to the mass of the weight and the height of the drop.
So that line of experiments was strongly suggestive that there is such a thing as gravitational potential energy, and that the apparatus converted gravitational potential energy to heat.
But you can also see that there is an intermediate energy form: kinetic energy of the motion of the weight as it moves down.
The finding that temperature rise was proportional to heigh of the drop was corroborating evidence for a notion that it is meaningful to define a concept of work. Work being done is proportional to the force and proportional to the distance over which the force has been doing that work. In barebones notation: $W=Fs$
If you take a concept of gravitational potential energy as granted, and global conservation of energy, then you arrive at the following expression for kinetic energy: $\frac{1}{2}mv^2$
Generalizing: presumably all expressions for types of energy that have that form with a factor $\frac{1}{2}$ and a squared quantity arise in cases where some force is doing some form of work over some form of distance, so that it can be expressed as $W=Fs$
As pointed out in the earlier answer, the factor $\frac{1}{2}$ can be seen as arising from an integration step.
Conclusions:
When you move to a global concept of conservation of energy the demand of self-consistency narrows down the expression for kinetic energy to: $\frac{1}{2}mv^2$
Before that, before there was any notion of conversion of kinetic energy to some other form of energy the definition of $mv^2$ was good, as the only constraint was that the total amount of it is conserved.