ISO is not an acronym: the Greek-rooted name behind 25,000 global standards
Plenty of people assume ISO stands for International Standardization Organization. It doesn't. Because the full title would shorten differently in each language, the founders settled on one fixed short form, later explained through the Greek isos, meaning equal. Since 1947 the body has issued well over 25,000 standards touching almost every corner of technology.
Its ancestor was the International Federation of the National Standardizing Associations, set up in 1926 with a focus on mechanical engineering and suspended in 1942 during the Second World War. Afterwards the new United Nations Standards Coordinating Committee proposed a fresh global body, and in October 1946 delegates from 25 countries met in London to merge efforts. Operations began on 23 February 1947. Curiously, nobody cited the Greek word during those founding meetings. Early documents were styled recommendations, so ISO 1 first appeared in 1951 as ISO/R 1.
Independent and non-governmental, it is run from a central secretariat in Vernier, in the Canton of Geneva, and works in English, French and Russian. As of 2026 it had 175 national members, one per country. Only full member bodies vote; correspondent members, from countries lacking their own standards organisation, are kept informed, while subscriber members from small economies pay reduced fees. A General Assembly meets yearly, a rotating council of 20 member bodies sets the secretariat budget, and more than 800 committees and subcommittees draft the actual texts.
Coverage stretches from food safety and farming to transport and healthcare, though electrical and electronic engineering belongs to the International Electrotechnical Commission. The two share a joint committee on information technology, JTC 1, created in 1987; a second joint effort on energy efficiency and renewables, launched in 2009, was later wound up.
Besides full standards, ISO issues technical reports, specifications for subjects still maturing, corrections called corrigenda, and guides on standardisation itself. Titles pack in the number, an optional part and the year, as in ISO/IEC TR 17799:2000 on information security. Both name and logo are registered trademarks, and copies are not cheap: around US$120 or more each as of 2020, usually licensed to a single user.
Source: International Organization for Standardization
