When we ask people, or when searched online, the letters SOS ( without any period after each letter) are commonly believed to be an acronym for:
Save Our Ship
Save Our Souls
Sink Or Swim
Have you heard of backronyms? Well, it can be noted that SOS came into popular use after it went into effect. In actuality, it was originally intended when SOS was introduced in 1908, that the letters have no meaning.
According to my readings, SOS is actually a Morse “procedural signal” or “prosign.” As it is a ‘prosign’, its respective letters have no inherent meaning. In the simplest terms, SOS is a ‘SIGNAL’ which indicates distress and the need for help, and not an acronym or abbreviation of some sort.
SOS was first used by the steamship Arapahoe in 1909, and by the Titanic in 1912. After that, people applied their own specific meanings to the letters. Of course, we all know the most popular ones are “save our ship” and “save our souls.”
In MORSE coding, ‘SOS’ was chosen because the three dots, three dashes, three dots are easy to transmit and not easily confused with other letters by the sender or recipients. With the advent of radios on ships beginning in the 1920s, ‘Mayday’ became, and still is, the International Distress Signal, but SOS served its purpose, for a while.
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