On Sun, 27 Jan 2019 at 00:49, Sergio Manzi <s...@smz.it> wrote: > ... but now I have a doubt... I don't find any referenece... have I been > pranked? :-/ > I thought perhaps you had, because I couldn't turn up anything on a google search. Which is why I said I hadn't heard of it. But I was puzzled when you responded that the imperial hundredweight was "112 lb 8 stones" so I checked. And found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundredweight. So you were right about the cental. Except in British English we used hundredweight in my youth because we had never heard of "centum weight" or "quintal." And, to be honest, even hundredweight wasn't much used outside of people involved in bulk transportation of heavy goods, so it was pretty much ounces, pounds, stones and tons for ordinary people.
There are many more units of weight. I dimly remember a very old Science Fiction story in which aliens failed to invade the Earth because they were confused by all the different units of weight involved. I can't remember the name of the story or the author, but I can remember that one of the bizarre units was the catty. This way madness lies. Some of these bizarre units of weight are still in use in various parts of the world. The link above has an image of a weight restriction sign on Alderney (not part of the UK but a Crown Dependency) of 30cwt. Which is imperial cwt (or centum weight) not US cental. I'm seriously starting to think the wiki page adopted the most sensible strategy of saying that weights should be in metric units. Except for one problem. The various tons and hundredweights are not units of weight but of mass, so weight restrictions are given in mass units not weight units. We should be specifying weight restrictions in Newtons, dynes poundals and slugs. OK. Let's deprecate weight restrictions. Change the wiki to say weight restrictions are not permitted. :) -- Paul
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