POTUS/ˈpəʊtəs/

President of the United States.

The acronym has been common among Washington insiders for several decades. It has spread far wider in recent years, even outside the US, as a result in part of TV programmes like The West Wing. It has to be said it’s a pretty obvious abbreviation, one that must have occurred to many people down the years. But we’re sure its genesis lies with Mr Walter P Phillips, at the time a telegrapher for the United Press Association but who later became the president of the Columbia Graphophone Company.

POTUS One, though nobody
could have called him that.

Mr Phillips created his code in 1879 to streamline the reporting of court proceedings. It was used for many decades by news agencies and newspaper offices and would have been known to everyone dealing with copy coming in on the wire. It was a shorthand, in which expressions most likely to appear in news reports were abbreviated: fapib meant “filed a petition in bankruptcy”; ckx, “committed suicide”; utaf, “under the auspices of the”. The names of people in the news were frequently reduced to initials, as in this example that appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1910: “T trl o HKT ft mu o SW on Mu roof garden, nw in pg ...”, which the transcriber would at once have rendered as “The trial of Harry K Thaw for the murder of Stanford White on the Madison Square Roof Garden, now in progress ...” The numerical code 73 was short for “best regards”; 30 meant “end of message” and is still used by some reporters to mark the end of stories.

A writer in the Daily Northwestern of Wisconsin said this about the code in 1921:

One or more letters may mean one word, or may mean a group of words. For instance, a dot, dash and a dot, or the letter f, means “of the;” potus, “president of the United States”, xn, “constitution”, and hundreds of others, which, when sent at a high rate of speed, keep an operator’s attention constantly riveted on every dot and dash in order that he may transcribe the conglomeration, on a typewriter, into reading matter such as appears in the daily newspapers.

POTUS appeared in every edition and is first recorded in print in the Fort Wayne News of Indiana on 25 February 1903: “This is the way a message is sent on the wire: T potus, ixs, wi km to Kevy ... This jargon of letters conveys the following information: The president of the United States, it is said, will communicate to King Edward VII ...”

SCOTUS, Supreme Court of the United States, was also in the code. (FLOTUS, for First Lady of the United States, is much more recent and less common.) As a result of the Phillips code, both acronyms can lay claim to being the earliest known, beating AWOL, Absent Without Leave, which newspaper reports show was being said as a pronounceable word around 1918.

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