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The pound or pound-mass is a unit of mass used in both the British imperial and United States customary systems of measurement.Various definitions have been used; the most common today is the international avoirdupois pound, which is legally defined as exactly 0.453 592 37 kilograms, and which is divided into 16 avoirdupois ounces. [1]
Today, most Americans would refer to fractions of a cent rather than mills, a term that is widely unknown. For example, a gasoline price of $3.019 per gallon, if pronounced in full, would be "three dollars [and] one and nine-tenths cents" or "three <point> zero-one-nine dollars".
One-troy-ounce (480 gr; 31 g) samples of germanium, iron, aluminium, rhenium and osmium A Good Delivery silver bar weighing 1,000 troy ounces (83 troy pounds; 31 kg) Troy weight is a system of units of mass that originated in the Kingdom of England in the 15th century [ 1 ] and is primarily used in the precious metals industry.
English-speaking countries also used a system of units of fluid measure, or in modern terminology volume units, based on the apothecaries' system. Originally, the terms and symbols used to describe the volume measurements of liquids were the same as or similar to those used to describe weight measurements of solids [33] (for example, the pound by weight and the fluid pint were both referred to ...
Sterling (ISO code: GBP) is the currency of the United Kingdom and nine of its associated territories. [3] The pound is the main unit of sterling, [4] [c] and the word pound is also used to refer to the British currency generally, [7] often qualified in international contexts as the British pound or the pound sterling. [4]
In the Middle Ages, an English penny's weight was literally, as well as monetarily, 1 ⁄ 20 of an ounce and 1 ⁄ 240 of a pound of sterling silver. At that time, the pound unit in use in England was the Tower pound, equal to 7,680 Tower grains (also known as wheat grains). The medieval English pennyweight was thus equal to 32 Tower grains.
The English name pound is a Germanic adaptation of the Latin phrase libra pondo 'a pound weight'. [6] On the Iberian peninsula, the Kingdom of Aragon adopted the Carolingian monetary system (Catalan: lliura , sou and diners ), but those of Portugal and Castile (and subsequently Spain) retained the currency system inherited from al-Andalus .
See Weight for detail of mass/weight distinction and conversion. Avoirdupois is a system of mass based on a pound of 16 ounces, while Troy weight is the system of mass where 12 troy ounces equals one troy pound. The symbol g 0 is used to denote standard gravity in order to avoid confusion with the (upright) g symbol for gram.