SOS is often believed to be an abbreviation for "Save Our Ship" or "Save Our Souls" but was chosen because it has a simple and unmistakable Morse code representation three dots, three dashes, three dots, sent without any pauses between characters.
More recent examples include the brand name ''
Adidas
Adidas AG (; stylized as adidas since 1949) is a German multinational corporation, founded and headquartered in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, that designs and manufactures shoes, clothing and accessories. It is the largest sportswear manufactur ...
'', named after company founder
Adolf "Adi" Dassler but falsely believed to be an acronym for "All Day I Dream About Sport";
[All Day I Dream About Sport: The Story of the Adidas Brand, ] The word ''
Wiki
A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki contains multiple pages for the subjects or scope of the project, and could be either open to the pu ...
'', said to stand for "What I Know Is",
but in fact derived from the
Hawaiian phrase ''wiki-wiki'' meaning "fast";
or
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Man ...
, sometimes claimed to mean "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", but in fact chosen because Yahoo's founders liked the word's meaning of "rude, unsophisticated, uncouth" (taken from
Jonathan Swift
Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 – 19 October 1745) was an Anglo-Irish Satire, satirist, author, essayist, political pamphleteer (first for the Whig (British political party), Whigs, then for the Tories (British political party), Tories), poe ...
's book ''
Gulliver's Travels
''Gulliver's Travels'', or ''Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships'' is a 1726 prose satire by the Anglo-Irish writer and clergyman Jonathan ...
'').
See also
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Acronymization
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Acrostic
An acrostic is a poem or other word composition in which the ''first'' letter (or syllable, or word) of each new line (or paragraph, or other recurring feature in the text) spells out a word, message or the alphabet. The term comes from the Fre ...
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Mnemonic
A mnemonic ( ) device, or memory device, is any learning technique that aids information retention or retrieval (remembering) in the human memory for better understanding.
Mnemonics make use of elaborative encoding, retrieval cues, and imag ...
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Pseudo-acronym
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Recursive acronym
A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'', in which Hofs ...
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Retronym
A retronym is a newer name for an existing thing that helps differentiate the original form/version from a more recent one. It is thus a word or phrase created to avoid confusion between older and newer types, whereas previously (before there were ...
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Satiric misspelling
A satiric misspelling is an intentional misspelling of a word, phrase or name for a rhetorical purpose. This can be achieved with intentional malapropism (e.g. replacing ''erection'' for ''election''), enallage (giving a sentence the wrong form ...
References
{{Reflist
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Etymology
Folklore
Neologisms
Types of words
1980s neologisms