What is a stone?

I'm in the UK and what has puzzled me now, is why the US use pounds but not stones.....what do the pounds add up to?

Because it's easier to just count pounds instead of doing the "pounds, stone, pound, stone" thing, and we're a bunch of bullheaded Yanks who refuse to just switch to metric and be done with it.

The next unit up is generally considered tons, or 2000 pounds.

Hang on a minute...in Britain a ton is 2240lbs. 112lbs (8st) to a hundred weight, 20 hundred weights to a ton. 112*20 is definitely 2240lbs. Off to check difference in British and American tons.

Another word for rock.

Oddly, the only thing I see gallons in is 'miles per gallon', yet we buy fuel in litres, making it even more foolish way to calculate economy!

I just started watching "Fat Doctor" on YouTube, which is a British TV series about obese people undergoing gastric surgery to lose weight (I'm not really interested in the surgery angle, but enjoy hearing of their struggles and successes).

They refer to their weight in "stones", and I had to plug it into my measurement conversion app to figure out what they were talking about. If your mind has a grasp of what that measurement represents, it is a nice compact number to work with.

Personally, with weight loss, I prefer to use pounds because every small amount of loss is obvious (it takes longer to lose a kilo than a pound). I'd hate to have to wait until I lost 14 pounds to have a change in my recorded weight!

Use 12 hour clock plenty in the UK (I'm british, but born in Botswana and grew up in Papua New Guinea just to confuse things).
Only really use 24 hour when doing techy stuff like programming or flying I'd say.

Any time I hear 'ton' in the UK people are talking about tonne or 1000kg I would say.

Technically our billion is a million million; but we're adopted the US system of it meaning a thousand million.

Plenty of stuff is still sold in fairly imperial sizes - for instance you'll get an 8x4 sheet or wood, or 2440mmx1220mm.

Yes, but it's not called 8x4 officially.

I don know if trying standards are still jumping on people for not using metric but this guy made the news:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1354395/Greengrocer-faces-court-for-refusing-to-go-metric.html

I just started watching "Fat Doctor" on YouTube, which is a British TV series about obese people undergoing gastric surgery to lose weight (I'm not really interested in the surgery angle, but enjoy hearing of their struggles and successes).

They refer to their weight in "stones", and I had to plug it into my measurement conversion app to figure out what they were talking about. If your mind has a grasp of what that measurement represents, it is a nice compact number to work with.

Personally, with weight loss, I prefer to use pounds because every small amount of loss is obvious (it takes longer to lose a kilo than a pound). I'd hate to have to wait until I lost 14 pounds to have a change in my recorded weight!

No you wouldn't. You'd go from 13st13 to 13st12, or whatever. Not all apps can cope with it, though, and refer to stones as if it were a decimal measure, e.g 13.5 stone which is actually 13st7.

I used to work with an American girl here in the UK and we had to explain what we meant by "a quarter past" or " a quarter to" when telling the time.

:huh:

I rarely use the 24 hour clock, if I'm talking I'd say 2 o clock. I was working out in the states a couple of years ago and the one thing that really used to confuse them was we'd arrange to meet at half 7 a lot, took them a while to realise this was half past 7, or 7.30. One girl thought we were expressing 3.30 in a strange way!!

I used to work with an American girl here in the UK and we had to explain what we meant by "a quarter past" or " a quarter to" when telling the time.

When I grew up in the states, I could never get my head around "quarter of". "Quarter to" makes much more sense. I think we said quarter past, though. Or maybe that's quarter of? Who knows.

Perhaps it's a regional thing? The "quarter of" thing sounds alien to me. We use "quarter to" (or rather, "quarter till" ie - 15 minutes until X o'clock), and "quarter after" or "half past" around here. According to the comments on this site - http://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2009/05/on-quarter-of.html - it seems it may be a New England thing (the midwesterner, southern, and northwesterner comments all mention that "quarter of" sounds absurd, and they only encounter it in New York or Massachusetts).

Stones is the popular metric weight term used in the UK, there are 14lbs in 1 Stone

not metric.... but imperial!!!!

we love our imperials in the uk - be in pounds, stones, inches, feet, pints - the metric system has just passed us by (much like euros, but lets not get into that one!)

not in baby weights....we weigh and measure new born babies in grams/cms....then have to translate for the general UK population...tho NOT for our European immigrants!!

The English ****ed up metrics. I really wish that the US would have adopted the metric system instead of the English standard of measurements. Would have made calculations so much easier to do.

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