International Organization for Standardization
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is an international non-governmental organization, composed of representatives of national standards bodies, that produces world-wide industrial and commercial standards. See also standardization.
ISO cooperates closely with the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC), which is responsible for standardization of electrical equipment.
It is a common misconception that ISO stands for International Standards Organization, or something similar. ISO is not an acronym; it comes from the Greek word iso, meaning equal. In English its name is International Organization for Standardization, while in French it is called Organisation Internationale pour Normalisation; to use an acronym would result in different acronyms in English (IOS) and French (OIN), thus the founders of the organization chose ISO as the universal short form of its name.
- ISO 216 paper sizes
- ISO 3166 country codes
- ISO 4217 currency codes
- ISO 7811 recording technique on identification cards
- ISO 8601 date and time representation
- ISO 8859 character encodings that include ASCII as a subset
- ISO 9000 Quality Management System in production environments
- ISO 9660 CD-ROM file system
- ISO 9899 C programming language
- ISO 10279 BASIC programming language
- ISO 10646 Universal Character Set
- ISO 14000 Environmental Management Standards in production environments
- ISO/IEC 1539-1 Fortran programming language
The term "ISO" in the context of software distribution refers to a disk image in the ISO 9660 format and is pronounced "eye-so".