POS

POS

See also: pos, Pos, Pos., PoS, POs, pos-, pós, pós-, pòs, pôs, pōš, and pøs

English

Pronunciation

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Noun

POS (countable and uncountable, plural POSes)

1. (law) Initialism of proof of service.
2. (medicine) Initialism of peripheral oxygen saturation.
3. (linguistics) Initialism of part of speech.

   Alternative form: PoS

   • 2018, Clarence Green; James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects”, in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, volume 35, DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2018.07.004, page 109:

     To include part-of-speech (POS) information, the corpus was tagged using the CLAWS tagger.

4. (retail) Initialism of point of sale or point of service.
5. (computing) Initialism of proprietary operating system.
6. (navigation, aviation) Initialism of position and orientation system.
7. (vulgar, of a person or thing) Initialism of piece of shit.
   • 2011, Sarreta “Whispers” Lopez, “I Have Recognized My Worth”, in I Have Arrived, AuthorHouse, →ISBN, page 69:

     Everything you lost was because you are a P.O.S,^[sic] […]

   • 2014, Harmony Rose, Married Under the Influence: A True Story, Bloomington, IN: Archway Publishing, →ISBN, page 78:

     I told him he is a POS for saying that to me (what a terrible thing to say to my husband! I am just as guilty sometimes for saying hurtful things), and how dare he try and hurt me in such a cruel way, telling me he hates me and wishing he could tell me he was unfaithful!

   • 2015, Kenton Bartlett, “Change”, in The World Needs You (A Pep Talk), C.E. Press, →ISBN, page 387:

     And you act in ways that make it right (i.e., voice says you’re a P.O.S., which makes you want the drugs, which makes you act selfishly, which gives you reason to feel like a P.O.S., which makes you want the drugs), because you don’t know what kind of person you’d be if you weren’t listening to this squawk, and you don’t know what else to do.

   • 2019 February 17, Kathrine Jebsen Moore, quoting Maria Tusken, “A Witch-hunt on Instagram”, in Claire Lehmann, editor, Quillette‎, Sydney, N.S.W., archived from the original on 2 March 2019:

     There have been many times I’ve had to keep my mouth shut due to fear of something like this happening. I have been called a ‘hateful racist POS [piece of shit]^[sic].’

Phrase

POS

1. (Internet, text messaging) Initialism of parent over shoulder (i.e. observing the young user's conversation).

   I would describe the lewd behavior, but I have POS right now, so I'll change the topic of this conversation, in order to prevent my punishment.

Anagrams

• OPS, OPS+, OPs, PSO, S.O.P., SOP, ops, sop