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The former Weights and Measures office in Seven Sisters, London (590 Seven Sisters Road). The imperial system of units, imperial system or imperial units (also known as British Imperial [1] or Exchequer Standards of 1826) is the system of units first defined in the British Weights and Measures Act 1824 and continued to be developed through a series of Weights and Measures Acts and amendments.
Weights and Measures (Metric System) Act 1897 (60 & 61 Vict. c. 46) [86] An Act to legalise the Use of Weights and Measures of the Metric System. Weights and Measures Acts of 1878 to 1893 was the collective title of the following Acts: [87] Weights and Measures Act 1878 (41 & 42 Vict. c 49) Weights and Measures Act 1889 (52 & 53 Vict. c 21)
Imperial units were mostly used in the former British Empire and the British Commonwealth, but in all these countries they have been largely supplanted by the metric system. They are still used for some applications in the United Kingdom but have been mostly replaced by the metric system in commercial, scientific, and industrial applications.
The basic unit of length in the imperial and U.S. customary systems is the yard, defined as exactly 0.9144 m by international treaty in 1959. [2] [5] Common imperial units and U.S. customary units of length include: [6] thou or mil (1 ⁄ 1000 of an inch) inch (25.4 mm) foot (12 inches, 0.3048 m) yard (3 feet, 0.9144 m)
In England (and the British Empire), English units were replaced by Imperial units in 1824 (effective as of 1 January 1826) by a Weights and Measures Act, which retained many though not all of the unit names and redefined (standardised) many of the definitions. In the US, being independent from the British Empire decades before the 1824 reforms ...
Belize, which is a former British colony, uses both the metric and British imperial systems. [176] [177] Miles are the most commonly used unit for measuring distance, [178] and gasoline is sold in US gallons (similar to neighboring countries in Central America).
The metric system is a decimal-based system of measurement. The current international standard for the metric system is the International System of Units (Système international d'unités or SI), in which all units can be expressed in terms of seven base units: the metre (m), kilogram (kg), second (s), ampere (A), kelvin (K), mole (mol), and ...
The foot (standard symbol: ft) [1] [2] is a unit of length in the British imperial and United States customary systems of measurement. The prime symbol, ′, is commonly used to represent the foot. [3] In both customary and imperial units, one foot comprises 12 inches, and one yard comprises three feet.