DOA Acronym for “dead on arrival,” also written D.O.A

The term, dating from the mid-1900s, originally denoted a victim arriving at a hospital or clinic already deceased. Thus T. Flint put it in Emergency Treatment (1958), “Cases in which a spark of life is detected should not be classified as ‘D.O.A.”’ Although still used in this sense, more recently the phrase has been extended to other situations. On February 7, 2005, on the PBS news program Lehrer Report, one of the commentators described a provision in President Bush’s new budget as “dead on arrival,” suggesting that it would never be passed by Congress.