What the Eff is a stone?

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  • Shropshire1959
    Shropshire1959 Posts: 982 Member
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    I wish everyone would just go to Metric and be done with it! (USA).
    The world is shrinking and we need to be on the same page, so to speak. It's used in marketing and sciences. Everyone is familiar with it so let's just go with it! Even an American that has never left their hometown knows what a liter of soda is!

    Indeed and maybe they wouldn't have lost a multi-million $ space craft either :tongue: :tongue: :tongue: :tongue: (NASA's metric confusion caused Mars orbiter loss )
  • Myhaloslipped
    Myhaloslipped Posts: 4,317 Member
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    if you google what is a stone its not very helpful........ lol considering its a rock.

    Then google a convernsion chart. You can assume when someone says they "weigh **stone" that it's a measurement.

    GOOGLE HARDER.

    ^lol, this. Clearly, people are not weighing themselves with rocks. :laugh:
    Ah but would you not think that it was how they came up with the "stone" way of measurement using stones or rocks!

    Good point. Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't that how the term "stone" for weight measurement originated?
  • spinnerdell
    spinnerdell Posts: 232 Member
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    My sainted mother stuffed stones in her pockets for her first weigh-in at a weight-loss group meeting, just to insure loss of weight at the next weigh-in. :wink:
  • Maryanne1923
    Maryanne1923 Posts: 53 Member
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    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.

    Haha! true :laugh:
  • Yagisama
    Yagisama Posts: 595 Member
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    You could just google "1 stone to lb" without the quotes. :)
  • kuolo
    kuolo Posts: 251 Member
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    From what I understand its a weight measurement? Am I right? Why use stones not lbs?

    You could see it the other way around - I find it odd that Americans use lbs up to the hundreds, when with everything else it's normal for the units to step up when the number gets high... so ounces go to lbs (so you could ask why not just use ounces rather than lbs?) yards go to miles, and even seconds go to minutes go to hours. If you think about it, it's much easier saying 10 stone 3, or 5 foot 6, 15 minutes or 2 miles rather than the equivalent large number of the unit below (I'm not going to work tham all out!).

    So if you think about it, it makes a lot more sense to go up from oz to lb to stones in the same way as we do with everything else, rather than just getting stuck at lbs, which is how it seems to us Brits when we see a weight above 14 lbs :laugh:

    And all the weights in lbs on here make my head hurt! I try to convert them occasionally but unless someone weighs similar to me I don't really have a clue half the time!
  • Slacker16
    Slacker16 Posts: 1,184 Member
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    So if you think about it, it makes a lot more sense to go up from oz to lb to stones in the same way as we do with everything else, rather than just getting stuck at lbs, which is how it seems to us Brits when we see a weight above 14 lbs :laugh:

    And all the weights in lbs on here make my head hurt! I try to convert them occasionally but unless someone weighs similar to me I don't really have a clue half the time!
    At least pounds are related to stones...

    I was born and raised on the metric system so lbs mean completely nothing to me. I can convert them to kilos when necessary but most of the time I don't even bother trying.
  • kuolo
    kuolo Posts: 251 Member
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    So if you think about it, it makes a lot more sense to go up from oz to lb to stones in the same way as we do with everything else, rather than just getting stuck at lbs, which is how it seems to us Brits when we see a weight above 14 lbs :laugh:

    And all the weights in lbs on here make my head hurt! I try to convert them occasionally but unless someone weighs similar to me I don't really have a clue half the time!
    At least pounds are related to stones...

    I was born and raised on the metric system so lbs mean completely nothing to me. I can convert them to kilos when necessary but most of the time I don't even bother trying.

    Yes I can see that imperial measurements must seem bonkers if you're used to metric. Having said that, I was raised halfway between the two, so to me height is feet and inches, distance is miles but if it's less than a mile it's metres (unless it's less than about two metres, when it becomes feet again, or sometimes cm if it's less than a couple of feet), weight of food is grams and other things is kg and metric tons, except for people, which are in stones and lbs, and volume is in litres - except for beer and milk which are always in pints. It gets confusing :noway:
  • sunshine1082
    sunshine1082 Posts: 85 Member
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    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.

    Hey, you may have taken the scenic route to get there, but it sounds like you know more about conversions than the average person! :smile:
  • JaneyB311
    JaneyB311 Posts: 80 Member
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    Im british and i have been brought up with stone and lbs but since using this site i speak to friends in lbs and they haven't got a clue what im on about hahah the english way i suppose

    Yeah I'm British too always get asked 'So what is that in stones?' lol
  • misschoppo
    misschoppo Posts: 463 Member
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    not quite a boulder but larger then a pebble....

    :laugh:

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