It took more than 50 years, but "smoot" is in the dictionary

The immortalization of Oliver R. Smoot in 1958

The Boston Globe reported on Sunday that the new edition of the American Heritage Dictionary, which is being released this week, includes among its new entries the word "smoot," a term already well-known to Bostonians and folks who went to college in that city.

A "smoot," the Globe explains, is a unit of measurement equal to the height of Oliver R. Smoot, who was a fraternity pledge at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge back in 1958. That's when he was laid end over end on the Harvard Bridge (aka the Mass. Ave. Bridge) linking Boston and Cambridge, to measure the span's length.

For the record, Smoot (the student) was 5 feet 7 inches tall, so a smoot (the measurement) is 5 feet 7 inches long. The bridge, which crosses the Charles River, is 364.4 smoots long, plus or minus one ear.

Other new words that made it into the dictionary include "upselling," "manboob," "panko," and "vuvuzela."