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The International System of Units, internationally known by the abbreviation SI (from French Système international d'unités), is the modern form of the metric system and the world's most widely used system of measurement. It is the only system of measurement with official status in nearly every country in the world, employed in science ...
The SI system after 1983, but before the 2019 revision: Dependence of base unit definitions on other base units (for example, the metre is defined as the distance travelled by light in a specific fraction of a second), with the constants of nature and artefacts used to define them (such as the mass of the IPK for the kilogram).
The SI system has been adopted as the official system of weights and measures by most countries in the world. A notable outlier is the United States (US). Although used in some contexts, the US has resisted full adoption; continuing to use "a conglomeration of basically incoherent measurement systems ".
The base unit in the International System of Units (SI) is the meter, defined as "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1 ⁄ 299792458 seconds." [4] It is approximately equal to 1.0936 yd.
The measurement of time is unique in SI in that while the second is the base unit, and measurements of time smaller than a second use prefixed units smaller than a second (e.g. microsecond, nanosecond, etc.), measurements larger than a second instead use traditional divisions, including the sexagesimal-based minute and hour as well as the less ...
The other units of length and mass, and all units of area, volume, and derived units such as density were derived from these two base units. Mesures usuelles (French for customary measures) were a system of measurement introduced as a compromise between the metric system and traditional measurements. It was used in France from 1812 to 1839.
The most widely used examples are the units of the International System of Units (SI). By extension they include units of electromagnetism from the CGS and SI units systems, and other units for which use of SI prefixes has become the norm. Other unit systems using metric units include: International System of Electrical and Magnetic Units
the statistical confidence interval or tolerance interval of the initial measurement; the number of significant figures of the measurement; the intended use of the measurement, including the engineering tolerances; historical definitions of the units and their derivatives used in old measurements; e.g., international foot vs. US survey foot.