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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".
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 ...
A fleeting hint of an ancient decimal or metric system may be found in the Mohenjo-Daro ruler, which uses a base length of 1.32 inches (33.5 mm) and is very precisely divided with decimal markings. Bricks from that period are consistent with this unit, but this usage appears not to have survived, as later systems in India are non-metric ...
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 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).
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)