Information AboutAvoirdupois |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT AVOIRDUPOIS | |
| units of mass | |
| imperial units | |
| customary units in the united states | |
| systems of units | |
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HISTORY OF THE TERM The word "avoirdupois" is from French and Middle English (Anglo-French) ''avoir de pois'', "goods of weight" or "goods sold by weight," and from Old French ''aveir de peis'', literally "goods of weight," from aveir, "property, goods" (from aveir, "to have," from Latin habere, "to have, to hold, to possess property") + de, "from" (from the Latin) + peis, "weight," from Latin pensum, "weight." This term originally referred to a class of merchandise: aveir de peis, "goods of weight," things that were sold in bulk and were weighed on large steelyards or balances. Only later did it become identified with a particular system of units used to weigh such merchandise. The imaginative orthography of the day and the passage of the term through a series of languages (Latin, Anglo-French and English) has left many variants of the term, such as ''haberty-poie'' and ''haber de peyse''. (The Norman "peis" became the Parisian "pois." In the 1600s "de" was replaced with "du.") ORIGINAL FORMS These are the units in their original French forms: BRITISH ADAPTATION When people in Ireland and Britain began to use this system they included the Stone , which was eventually defined as fourteen avoirdupois pounds. The quarter, hundredweight, and ton were altered, respectively, to 28 lb, 112 lb, and 2240 lb in order for Mass es to be easily converted between them and stone. The following are the units in the British or Imperial adaptation of the avoirdupois system: AMERICAN CUSTOMARY SYSTEM The British Colonies in North America , however, adopted the French system as it was. In the U.S., quarters, hundredweights, and tons remain defined as 25, 100, and 2000 lb (though the quarter is virtually unused, as is the hundredweight outside of agriculture and commodities); if disambiguation is required then tons are referred to as the "short" units, as opposed to the British "long" units. INTERNATIONALIZATION In the avoirdupois system, all units are multiples or fractions of the Pound , which is now defined as 0.45359237 Kg in most of the English-speaking world since 1959. (See the Mendenhall Order for references) Further, these weights were considered units of force, not mass. Hence in planetariums one amusement for the audience was a series of scales to show how one's weight would be different on planets with different surface gravity. The use of the metric units as primary has brought about the pronouncement that the avoirdupois units are now masses as well. SEE ALSO
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