What do the letters - 'SOS' - of the old distress signal stand for?
The Maritime distress signal, SOS, was a grouping of letters which stood for nothing in particular.It was a simple and easy sequence of code to remember. Later it became associated with terms such as, Save Our Souls or Save our Ship, and probably others. However, these were only unofficial designations.Related Information:It was first used by the Germans, sometime prior to 1906. The letters, SOS, in a linked, indefinitely repeating sequence (no breaks) in Morse code, became the international distress signal in 1908. The use of the SOS distress signal was replaced, in 1999, by the Global Maritime Distress Safety System.