List of unusual units of measurement

A football field is often used as a comparative measurement of length when talking about distances that may be hard to comprehend when stated in terms of standard units.

[12] The globally-average radius of Earth, generally given as 6,371 kilometres (3,959 miles), is often employed as a unit of measure to intuitively compare objects of planetary size.

In groff/troff and specifically in the included traditional manuscript macro set ms, the vee (v) is a unit of vertical distance often—but not always—corresponding to the height of an ordinary line of text.

[20][21] The same area is called a square in the construction industry in North America,[22] and was historically used in Australia by real estate agents.

[27] An American football field, including both end zones, is 360 by 160 ft (120.0 by 53.3 yd; 109.7 by 48.8 m), or 57,600 square feet (5,350 m2) (0.535 hectares or 1.32 acres).

[42] A cubic ton is an antiquated measure of volume, varying based on the commodity from about 16 to 45 cu ft (0.45 to 1.27 m3).

A cord is the amount of wood that, when "ranked and well stowed" (arranged so pieces are aligned, parallel, touching and compact), occupies a volume of 128 cubic feet (3.62 m3).

[citation needed] In the concrete and petroleum industry, however, a bag of cement is defined as 94 lb (43 kg) because it has an apparent volume close to 1 cubic foot (28 litres).

[citation needed] In 1793, the French term "grave" (from "gravity") was suggested as the base unit of mass for the metric system.

Typically, this time is 0.01 seconds, though in some earlier systems (such as the Commodore 8-bit machines) the jiffy was defined as 1⁄60 of a second, roughly equal to the vertical refresh period (i.e. the field rate) on NTSC video hardware (and the period of AC electric power in North America).

This is a fairly representative example of "hacker humor",[66] and is occasionally used in operating systems; for example, the OpenVMS TIMEPROMPTWAIT parameter is measured in microfortnights.

[67] The sidereal day is based on the Earth's rotation rate relative to fixed stars, rather than the Sun.

), measurements larger than a second instead use traditional divisions, including the sexagesimal-based minute and hour as well as the less regular day and year units.

SI allows for the use of larger prefixed units based on the second, a system known as metric time, but this is seldom used, since the number of seconds in a day (86,400 or, in rare cases, 86,401) negate one of the metric system's primary advantages: easy conversion by multiplying or dividing by powers of ten.

The name kermit came from a combination of the surname of Dr. Larkin Kerwin, president of the National Research Council in 1983, with the word "metric".

[neutrality is disputed] Mils and strecks are small units of angle used by various military organizations for range estimation and translating map coordinates used for directing artillery fire.

Prior to the detonation of the Hiroshima bomb, the size of the Halifax Explosion (about 3 kt TNT equivalent, or 1.26×1013 J), was the standard for this type of relative measurement.

[83] A foe is a unit of energy equal to 1044 joules (≈9.478×1040 BTU) that was invented by physicist Gerry Brown of Stony Brook University.

Since about 2% of the human body mass is calcium, and Sr-90 has a half-life of 28.78 years, releasing 6.697+2.282 MeV per disintegration, this works out to about 1.065×10−12 grays per second.

Demography and quantitative epidemiology are statistical fields that deal with counts or proportions of people, or rates of change in these.

Popular units include the Bible, the Encyclopædia Britannica, phone books, the complete works of Shakespeare, and the Library of Congress.

Information researchers have estimated that the entire print collections of the Library of Congress represent roughly 10 terabytes of uncompressed textual data.

[95] A measure of quantity of data or information, the "nibble" (sometimes spelled "nybble" or "nybl") is normally equal to 4 bits, or one half of the common 8-bit byte.

[103] Formerly used in real estate transactions in the American Southwest, it was the number of pregnant cows an acre of a given plot of land could support.

James D. Hardy, Herbert G. Wolff, and Helen Goodell of Cornell University proposed the unit based on their studies of pain during the 1940s and 1950s.

Schmidt has refined his pain index (with a 1–4 scale) with extensive anecdotal experience, culminating in a paper published in 1990 which classifies the stings of 78 species and 41 genera of Hymenoptera.

The ASTA (American Spice Trade Association) pungency unit is based on a scientific method of measuring chili pepper "heat".

The technique utilizes high-performance liquid chromatography to identify and measure the concentrations of the various compounds that produce a heat sensation.

It is the degree of dilution in sugar water of a specific chili pepper extract when a panel of 5 tasters can no longer detect its "heat".

Traffic of one erlang refers to a single resource being in continuous use, or two channels being at fifty percent use, and so on, pro rata.