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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.
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 Winchester measure was made obsolete in the British Empire but remained in use in the US. [c] The Winchester bushel was replaced with an imperial bushel of eight imperial gallons. The subdivisions of the bushel were maintained. As with US dry measures, the imperial system divides the bushel into 4 pecks, 8 gallons, 32 quarts or 64 pints.
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 ...
The basic unit of length in the imperial and U.S. customary systems is the yard, defined as exactly 0.9144 m by international treaty in 1959. [2] [5] Common imperial units and U.S. customary units of length include: [6] thou or mil (1 ⁄ 1000 of an inch) inch (25.4 mm) foot (12 inches, 0.3048 m) yard (3 feet, 0.9144 m)
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 metric system is a decimal-based system of measurement. The current international standard for the metric system is the International System of Units (Système international d'unités or SI), in which all units can be expressed in terms of seven base units: the metre (m), kilogram (kg), second (s), ampere (A), kelvin (K), mole (mol), and ...