


Stranded Australian man uses drone to send SOS SMS on cell phone. According to Harold Bride, he had asked Phillips what he was sending and was told 'CQD.' Appealing to his sense of humour, Bride suggested using the new call, 'SOS', as it may be his last chance to send it. It’s sometimes used in situations that aren’t quite emergencies-you might text an SOS to your roommate to bring home ice cream, for example.Īt 12.57am, the first use of 'SOS' by the Titanic is recorded.

Today, the use of SOS as a general way to refer to a call for help is informal. The signal SOS was once commonly used in the context of radio communication among ships. SOS can also be used as a verb meaning to send such an SOS.Įxample: I have my phone set up to automatically send an SOS to certain contacts if I ever dial 9-1-1. The plural of SOS can be written as SOSs or SOS’s. When used this way, each letter is still pronounced individually ( S-O-S). The signal became well-known enough that SOS came to be used as an informal term for any call for help or notification that there is an emergency, as in Send an SOS to the board letting them know that we’ll have to schedule an emergency meeting.

) that was chosen since it would be easy to communicate with sounds over radio or with flashes of light.Morse code can be written out using dots to represent short clicks and dashes to represent long ones, resulting in a specific sequence for SOS ( S is represented by three short clicks or brief flashes of light, and O is represented by three long sounds or longer flashes of light (depicted with dashes). Morse code uses clicks and pauses, short and long sounds, or flashes of light to represent letters and numbers. The letter sequence SOS (pronounced S-O-S) is used in Morse code as a distress signal-a way to call for help during an emergency, such as on a ship.
