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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.
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.
Decimal multiplicative prefixes have been a feature of all forms of the metric system, with six of these dating back to the system's introduction in the 1790s. Metric prefixes have also been used with some non-metric units. The SI prefixes are metric prefixes that were standardised for use in the International System of Units (SI) by the ...
The stone or stone weight (abbreviation: st.) [1] is an English and British imperial unit of mass equal to 14 avoirdupois pounds (6.35 kg). [nb 1] The stone continues in customary use in the United Kingdom and Ireland for body weight.
The inch (symbol: in or ″) is a unit of length in the British Imperial and the United States customary systems of measurement. It is equal to 1 / 36 yard or 1 / 12 of a foot . Derived from the Roman uncia ("twelfth"), the word inch is also sometimes used to translate similar units in other measurement systems, usually ...
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 ...
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)
The yard (symbol: yd) [3] [4] is an English unit of length in both the British imperial and US customary systems of measurement equalling 3 feet or 36 inches. Since 1959 it has been by international agreement standardized as exactly 0.9144 meter. A distance of 1,760 yards is equal to 1 mile. The US survey yard is very slightly longer.