What the Eff is a stone?

This thread has inspired me to bring back the term "fortnight." This is happening.

wait..what?..did it ever go anywhere?? We use it all the time in Ireland....

In the UK retailers all have to use grams now instead of oz. and liquids are in ml. Most people know their weight in stones and their height in feet and inches (unless they are nurses then they use kg and cm). BUT our road signs and speedometers still use miles and mph??!!

But we have to buy our fuel by the litre - even though we measure our consumption in mpg!!! We move very slowly and reluctantly to metric.

The move from MPH and Miles to Kilometers will be very slow, if it ever happens. The cost of moving to Kg and g in shops was borne by the retailer, the move to metric on the road would cost the government a lot of money and they haven't got money to waste, I mean how would they get to pay their second mortgages on expenses if they wasted it on new road signs?

^^^^^ dont forget there orgies in hotel rooms and luxury holidays ahha

From what I understand its a weight measurement? Am I right? Why use stones not lbs?

Why are you so rude in your title question? It shouldn't matter but if you need to know it is a measurement the British people use to measure their weight.

To all the British people out there, I apologize for the ignorance and rudeness of this fellow American. Not all Americans are ignorant and rude, most are fairly intelligent and don't act like they are better than other people of other nations.

This thread has inspired me to bring back the term "fortnight." This is happening.

wait..what?..did it ever go anywhere?? We use it all the time in Ireland....

I love that!

At least you're moving. Here in 'Murica we like to crash multibillion dollar Mars landers because we can't be bothered to mark our units and refuse to use metric outside of the sciences.

At work, we weigh all of our patients in pounds, and then immediately convert it to kilos, which we use for all the dosage calculations, etc. This seems so pointless to me. We never use the pounds for anything (except maybe when talking to the owners). I can't change the larger scale, but I set the smaller scale on kilos, thinking this would save us a step. The boss told me I had to change it back because some of my coworkers were weighing the patients and then writing the kilos down on the line for pounds. How could you place an 11-pound cat on a scale and then write down that it weighs 5 pounds? How could they not tell the difference?

LOL, it does always amaze me how many people can't approximate the weight of an object, but not being able to tell the difference between an 11 pound cat and a 5 pound cat..... yikes.

I'm British but I find stones, pounds, feet, inches etc pretty hard to use without converting to metric. MPH is simply keeping the car dial to the numbers on the signs, but I walk and run in km! But I'll fight anyone trying to take my pint of beer!!

Fun fact, the US pint is different from the (traditional) British pint.

US pint = ~480 ml
UK pint = ~570 ml

Its a crucial 90 ml too

I thought it was 12lbs Well I was wrong xD This thread is helpful

My ridiculous Americans don't get metric story (by American I mean me, of course).

Back in summer '04 I was running and swimming a lot, running races, etc., and was also having trouble sleeping whenever I was kind of stressed. One early morning around 3 am I couldn't sleep and decided to watch a bit of the summer Olympics. Turned on the TV and saw there was some longer running race on, which was the kind of thing I was most interested in. So I starting watching and noticed it was described as a 5000 m race. Hmm, I thought, wonder how long that is in a unit of measurement I understand. Well, I knew a meter was similar to a yard, since 100 m and 100 yard pools were about the same, so in my head I figured that it was about 5000 divided by three or about 1700 feet. And I happened to recall that there are 5280 feet to a mile, so that meant it was about 3 miles, which I understood and also knew was about a 5K. Followed, of course, by the realization that 5000 m is, of course, a 5K.

It's a great big world we live in.....and believe it or not it is not just about us Americans. LOL

The stone is a unit of measure equal to 14lb used in Great Britain and Ireland for measuring human body weight.

In many Northwestern European countries the stone was formerly used for trade, though its value ranged from about 5 to 40 local pounds. With the advent of the metric system from the mid-19th century on, it was superseded by the kilogram. It remained in limited use for trade in the United Kingdom and in Ireland until prohibited by the Weights and Measures Act.