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RAS syndrome is the redundancy of acronyms, where the acronym is followed by one of the words it shortens. Examples include PIN number and ATM machine. The syndrome occurs when the added word is one of the words the acronym should have abbreviated. It is often used unintentionally, and some redundancies make the acronym more representative. RAS syndrome is only one type of verbal redundancy in the English language.
RAS syndrome refers to the unnecessary redundancy of some acronyms. The acronym “RAS” stands for Redundant Acronym Syndrome, so the term “RAS Syndrome” incorporates the linguistically strange use of an acronym that is followed by one of the words it shortens, which is exactly what the term describes. Basically, “RAS Syndrome” means Redundant Acronym Syndrome. An example of a term that suffers from RAS syndrome is “PIN number,” which essentially means personal identification number.
This concept was first explained by New Scientist magazine in 2001. Acronyms are supposed to shorten a sentence for ease of use, but people occasionally add words to the acronym for common language. The syndrome occurs when the word being added is one of the words the acronym should have abbreviated in the first place, as in RAS syndrome or PIN number.
Other occurrences of RAS syndrome in the English language include common references to ATMs as “ATMs”, alternating current as “AC current”, direct current as “DC current”, and individual retirement accounts as “IRA accounts”. In any case, the word added to the acronym is also represented by the last letter of the acronym. In some cases, it is possible to add more than one word even though the first few letters are already present in the acronym. An example is an emergency position indicating radio beacon, which is often called an “EPIRB rescue beacon”.
Sometimes, the speaker of a RAS syndrome sentence is not aware that they are using verb redundancy to describe something, because they may not know the words the acronym represents. While the redundancies of RAS syndrome would sound wrong when stated in their entirety, many of them sound good when in acronym form. Redundancies may be present to make the acronym more representative of the description, because few acronyms make clear what they stand for.
RAS syndrome describes only some of the verbal redundancies present in the English language. Rhetorical tautologies, for example, use two words in a sentence to say the same thing. Some examples are ‘safe haven’, because refuge inherently implies safety, or ‘prior experience’, because experience, by definition, is in the past.
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