In this paper, the peak-to-average power ratio (PAPR) of orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) signal is reduced by combining the discrete cosine transform (DCT) with clipping in optical intensity-modulated direct-detection (IM/DD) OFDM systems. First, the data are transformed into new modified data by DCT. Second, the proposed scheme utilizes the clipping technique to further reduce the PAPR of OFDM signal. We experimentally demonstrate that the optical OFDM transmission system with this proposed scheme can achieve significant performance improvement in terms of PAPR and bit error rate (BER) compared with the original optical OFDM systems.