Oliver R. Smoot

Common card · No. 374977

Oliver Reed Smoot Jr. (born August 24, 1940) is an American academic. He was a former chairman of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) from 2001 to 2002 and president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) from 2003 to 2004. In 2011, American Heritage Dictionary admitted his decapitalized surname, smoot, meaning a distance of 5 feet 7 inches (1.70 m), as one of the 10,000 new words added to their fifth edition. The term is named for Smoot from his undergraduate days when he was used as a unit of measurement on the Harvard Bridge at MIT during a fraternity pledge activity. The bridge measures 364.4 smoots.

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