Dear All,

Does anyone know how glove sizes work.

A few days ago my elderly mother-in-law had a fall and we had to take her to
the emergency section of the Geelong Hospital where they checked her for
concussion. She's OK now.

In each examination booth there were three boxes attached to the wall, each
of which had surgical gloves of a different size. The smallest were labelled
5-6, the next box was labelled 6-7 and the box with the largest gloves had
7-8 on the side. I looked carefully but I could not figure out what the
numbers might mean.

Some years ago a friend of mine (in the textile business) was carrying out
an investigation on how to size panty-hose. All he told me about his
investigation, after he had measured hundreds of women was that he
considered the best size numbering method would be one that referred to
volume. Apparently measures such as leg circumference, leg length, waist and
hip circumference were not sufficient to describe the panty-hose region of
female human bodies � women vary too much. What he said he needed to do was
to devise an estimate of volume for each woman and then he could make some
sense from all of his data.

Is glove sizing some variation of this? For example, do the numbers on the
glove boxes refer to hand volume in cubic inches?

Cheers,

Pat Naughtin CAMS
Geelong, Australia

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