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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.
A similar system is used in natural gas sales in the United States: m (or M) for thousands and mm (or MM) for millions (thousand thousands) of British thermal units or therms, and in the oil industry, [30] where MMbbl is the symbol for "millions of barrels".
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 ...
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.
The International System of Units is the modern metric system. It is based on the metre–kilogram–second–ampere (MKSA) system of units from early in the 20th century. [20] It also includes numerous coherent derived units for common quantities like power (watt) and irradience (lumen).
The imperial system of units was developed and used in the United Kingdom and its empire beginning in 1824. The metric system has, to varying degrees, replaced the imperial system in the countries that once used it. Most of the units of measure have been adapted in one way or another since the Norman Conquest (1066).
The Weights and Measures (Metric System) Act 1897 (60 & 61 Vict. c. 46) provided that metric units could be used in addition to the traditional imperial units for purposes of trade. [ 7 ] [ 8 ] In practice, the actual choice of units was restricted by price marking orders which listed packaging sizes and pricing structures that might be used in ...