People are learning that SOS doesn’t actually stand for anything – and their minds are blown!
- Reddit users reveals international emergency symbol doesn’t stand for anything
- READ MORE: People are causing confusion by claiming ‘tips’ is an acronym
Whether it’s a dramatic situation like being stranded at sea or you need a friend to come and rescue you from a boring conversation at a party, SOS is the universal distress call that indicates you need help.
Most smartphones even have an SOS feature embedded for users to use in an emergency, but it turns out a lot of people can’t agree what the term actually means.
Taking to Reddit, a user from the US sparked debate by revealing that the letters are not an acronym, contrary to what a lot of people think.
They wrote: ‘Today I learned that despite the popular belief that SOS stands for “Save Our Ship” or “Save Our Souls”, it actually doesn’t stand for anything.
‘SOS was developed because it was an easy sequence of letters to remember in Morse Code (three dots, three dashes, three dots).’
The post provoked a debate in the comments, with one user agreeing that SOS can’t be an acronym because of the way it’s pronounced, pointing out that it’s ‘ess-oh-ess’.
‘To be an acronym it has to be pronounced as a word in itself,’ they said.
Another took a swipe at self-styled language experts, saying: Most times what they tell you is something that someone has proposed as an etymology, with no evidence to support it.
‘Cop does not derive from “constable on patrol” for instance.’
Whether you’re stranded at sea on an unknown island, or trapped beneath a cave in the middle of nowhere, you probably know how to about the emergency SOS warning, often embedded into modern-day smartphone features (stock image)
But this prompted another user to pose a very valid question – ‘Well where in the heck DID the word “cop” come from then?’
Another user asserted that ‘Morse Code is a dying thing The United States Coast Guard has ceased all use of Morse code on the radio, and no longer monitors any radio frequencies for Morse code transmissions, including the international medium frequency (MF) distress frequency of 500 kHz.[30]’
But it turns out that the original Reddit user was correct.
According to todayifoundout.com, SOS in Morse Code is signified by three dots, three dashes, then three dots – and was designed as a message that ‘could not be misinterpreted as being a message for anything else’.
‘This signal [SOS] was adopted simply on account of its easy radiation and its unmistakable character. There is no special significance in the letters themselves.’
The website goes on to add: ‘Being sent together as one string (with no stops), it could be sent very quickly and needs very little power to transmit.
So there is a consensus out there that the SOS signal was created and adopted as the universal international distress signal with inspiration from the Morse Code, first developed by Samuel Morse in the early 19th century, rather than its letters standing for anything.
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