smoot

I usually don’t write up novelty words, but smoot has a neat ironic twist that is impossible to ignore. A smoot is a unit of linear measure equal to 1.7018 meters (5 feet, 7 inches). It is named after Oliver Reed Smoot, Jr. (b. 1940).

The smoot grew out of a university fraternity prank. In October 1958, members of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used Smoot, who was one of their pledges, as a measuring stick to determine the length of the Harvard Bridge over the Charles River, which connects the MIT campus in Cambridge to Boston. Smoot was required to lay down while his fellow pledges marked each increment with chalk. (They had planned to use a length of string, ten smoots long, for the measurement, but a fraternity brother required they actually use Smoot himself.) The bridge measures 364.4 smoots, plus or minus one εar (properly spelled with an epsilon to indicate possible error in the measurement). To this day, undergraduates at MIT maintain marks on the bridge that indicate the length in ten smoot increments.

The ironic twist is that Smoot would go on to become the chair of the American National Standards Institute (2001–02) and president of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO, 2003–04).

Sources:

American Heritage Dictionary, fifth edition, 2022, s.v. smoot, n.

Durant, Elizabeth. “Smoot’s Legacy.” MIT Technology Review, 23 June 2008.

Gillooly, Patrick. “Smoot Reflects on His Measurement Feat as 50^th Anniversary Nears.” MIT News, 24 September 2008.

Photo credit: Unknown Photographer, 1958. MIT Museum. Fair use of a copyrighted image to illustrate the topic under discussion.