Imperial Weights and Measures - introduction

index --- alpha --- intro --- length --- area --- volume --- weight --- money --- angles --- weather --- other --- foreign --- trades --- documents --- metric --- tables

I was born in 1953. When I was young, like all British school children of the time, I had to learn my Weights and Measures as part of my 'tables' at school. These were the British Imperial units. They were printed on the back of our exercise books (with blank pages, where we did our written work). Click here for a modern replica. Many of the units we used in our everyday life, inches and ounces and pints and shillings were second nature to us, but some, like rods, poles and perches, were completely mysterious, and others, like bushels, cropped up in literature. Now children are taught metric at school, and thinks in centimetres and grams and kilos and 'new' money. So I decided to put some old-fashioned tables on the internet. While metric measures are simpler, these old measures are still part of our language, and will always be part of our literature. Anyway, it will be hard for my generation to think naturally in anything else. I am happy to use metric units, yet it would be sad if these old units were forgotten. This website started as a simple set of tables, but has gradually grown to add snippets of information as well. There are also convertors.

The U.S. Customary systems are similar to the British Imperial System, but I mention where they differ.

I have had many people write into me about this site. Some have gone through it with a fine comb and found plenty of errors, which I have corrected. Others have told me about lots of other interesting units, and I have included them in the site. So this site is partly due to them and I would like to acknowledge this, and thank them for their efforts. If you would like to do the same, please email me (Jo Edkins).

Links to other websites

© Jo Edkins 2009 - Return to units index