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secure the co-operation of the technical societies of the world, by
the appointment of a representative Commission to consider the
question of the standardization of the nomenclature and ratings of
electrical apparatus and machinery”. From the very beginning, IEC
considered it its foremost task to standardize the terminology of
electrotechnology for the sake of the quality of its subject
standards, and soon embarked upon the International
Electrotechnical Vocabulary (IEV), whose first edition, based on
many individual terminology standards, was published in
1938.The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC),
headquartered in Geneva, was founded in St. Louis, Missouri in
1904. In 1906 it began work on unifying methods and developing
guidelines for regulating electrical engineering production
internationally. Today the IEC is the sole international body of
reference for electrical engineering and electronics. It has 73
national committees and 111 subcommittees that cover the entire
field of electrical and electronic engineering and other related
fields such as nuclear powerplants, electronic data processing,
electroacoustics, etc. It has 43 member countries and to date has
published more than 1,500 international standards. The IEC has
had a committee for terminology (Committee No. 1) since 1910. In
1938 it published the first edition of a dictionary of electrical
engineering in 50 parts, each of which covered a specific subfield.
This first edition included 2000 terms defined in English and
French, with equivalents in German, Spanish, Italian and
Esperanto. Russian became the third official language of the IEC
in 1960.
In 1926 a group of national standardization bodies created
after World War I founded an International Federation of National
Standardization Associations (ISA). The predecessor to the
International Organization for Standardization (ISO), the
International Federation of Standardizing Associations (ISA,
founded in 1926), made a similar experience. But it went a step
further and – triggered by the publication of E. Wüster’s book

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