Barleycorn (unit)
The barleycorn is an English unit of length equal to of an inch (i.e. about ). It is still used as the basis of shoe sizes in English-speaking countries. History Under the c. AD 1300 Composition of Yards and Perches, one of the statutes of uncertain date that was notionally in force until the 1824 Weights and Measures Act, "3 barly cornes dry and rounde" were to serve as the basis for the inch and thence the larger units of feet, yards, perches and thus of the acre, an important unit of area. The notion of three barleycorns composing an inch certainly predates this statute, however, appearing in the 10th-century Welsh Laws of Hywel Dda. In practice, various weights and measures acts of the English kings were standardized with reference to some particular yard-length iron, brass, or bronze bar held by the king or the Royal Exchequer. The formal barleycorn was of its length. As modern studies show, the actual length of a kernel of barley varies from as short as ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Grain (unit)
A grain is a unit of measurement of mass, and in the troy weight, avoirdupois, and apothecaries' systems, equal to exactly milligrams. It is nominally based upon the mass of a single ideal seed of a cereal. From the Bronze Age into the Renaissance, the average masses of wheat and barley grains were part of the legal definitions of units of mass. Expressions such as "thirty-two grains of wheat, taken from the middle of the ear" appear to have been ritualistic formulas, essentially the premodern equivalent of legal boilerplate. Another source states that it was defined such that 252.458 units would balance of distilled water at an ambient air-water pressure and temperature of and respectively. Another book states that Captain Henry Kater, of the British Standards Commission, arrived at this value experimentally. The grain was the legal foundation of traditional English weight systems, and is the only unit that is equal throughout the troy, avoirdupois, and apothecaries' ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Perch (unit)
The rod, perch, or pole (sometimes also lug) is a surveyor's tool and unit of length of various historical definitions, often between approximately 3 and 8 meters (9 ft 10 in and 26 ft 2 in). In modern US customary units it is defined as US survey feet, equal to exactly of a surveyor's mile, or a quarter of a surveyor's chain ( yards), and is approximately 5.0292 meters. The rod is useful as a unit of length because whole number multiples of it can form one acre of square measure (area). The 'perfect acre' is a rectangular area of 43,560 square feet, bounded by sides 660 feet (a furlong) long and 66 feet wide (220 yards by 22 yards) or, equivalently, 40 rods and 4 rods. An acre is therefore 160 square rods or 10 square chains. The name ''perch'' derives from the Ancient Roman unit, the ''pertica''. The measure also has a relationship with the military pike of about the same size. Both measures date from the sixteenth century, when the pike was st ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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List Of Unusual Units Of Measurement
An unusual unit of measurement is a unit of measurement that does not form part of a coherent system of measurement, especially because its exact quantity may not be well known or because it may be an inconvenient multiple or fraction of a base unit. This definition is not exact since it includes units such as the ''week'' or the ''light-year'', which are quite "usual" in the sense that they are often used, but can be "unusual" if taken out of their common context, as demonstrated by the furlong-firkin-fortnight (FFF) system of units. Many of the unusual units of measurements listed here are colloquial measurements, units devised to compare a measurement to common and familiar objects. Length Hammer unit Valve's Source game engine uses the ''Hammer unit'' as its base unit of length. This unit refers to Source's official map creation software, Hammer. The exact definition varies from game to game, but a Hammer unit is usually defined as a sixteenth of a foot (16 H ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Line (unit)
The line (abbreviated L or l or ‴ or lin.) was a small English unit of length, variously reckoned as , , , or of an inch. It was not included among the units authorized as the British Imperial system in 1824. Size The line was not recognized by any statute of the English Parliament but was usually understood as of a barleycorn, which itself was recognized by statute as of an inch. The line was eventually decimalized as of an inch, without recourse to barleycorns. The US button trade uses the same or a similar term but defined as one-fortieth of the US-customary inch (making a button-maker's line equal to 0.635 mm). In use Botanists formerly used the units (usually as inch) to measure the size of plant parts. Linnaeus's ''Philosophia botanica'' (1751) includes the Linea in its summary of units of measurements, defining it as "Linea una Mensurae parisinae"; Stearns gives its length as 2.25 mm. Even after metrication, British botanists continued to employ ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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University Of Wisconsin Press
The University of Wisconsin Press (sometimes abbreviated as UW Press) is a non-profit university press publishing peer-reviewed books and journals. It publishes work by scholars from the global academic community; works of fiction, memoir and poetry under its imprint, Terrace Books; and serves the citizens of Wisconsin by publishing important books about Wisconsin, the Upper Midwest, and the Great Lakes region. UW Press annually awards the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, and The Four Lakes Prize in Poetry. The press was founded in 1936 in Madison and is one of more than 120 member presses in the Association of American University Presses. The Journals Division was established in 1965. The press employs approximately 25 full and part-time staff, produces 40 to 60 new books a year, and publishes 11 journals. It also distributes books and some annual journals for selected smaller publishers. The press is a unit of the Graduate School of the Univer ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Royal Exchequer
In the civil service of the United Kingdom, His Majesty’s Exchequer, or just the Exchequer, is the accounting process of central government and the government's ''current account'' (i.e., money held from taxation and other government revenues) in the Consolidated Fund. It can be found used in various financial documents including the latest departmental and agency annual accounts. It was the name of a British government department responsible for the collection and the management of taxes and revenues; of making payments on behalf of the sovereign and auditing official accounts. It also developed a judicial role along with its accountancy responsibilities and tried legal cases relating to revenue. Similar offices were later created in Normandy around 1180, in Scotland around 1200 and in Ireland in 1210. Etymology The Exchequer was named after a table used to perform calculations for taxes and goods in the medieval period. According to the ''Dialogus de Scaccario'' ('Dialogu ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Bronze
Bronze is an alloy consisting primarily of copper, commonly with about 12–12.5% tin and often with the addition of other metals (including aluminium, manganese, nickel, or zinc) and sometimes non-metals, such as phosphorus, or metalloids such as arsenic or silicon. These additions produce a range of alloys that may be harder than copper alone, or have other useful properties, such as strength, ductility, or machinability. The archaeological period in which bronze was the hardest metal in widespread use is known as the Bronze Age. The beginning of the Bronze Age in western Eurasia and India is conventionally dated to the mid-4th millennium BCE (~3500 BCE), and to the early 2nd millennium BCE in China; elsewhere it gradually spread across regions. The Bronze Age was followed by the Iron Age starting from about 1300 BCE and reaching most of Eurasia by about 500 BCE, although bronze continued to be much more widely used than it is in modern times. Because histori ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Brass
Brass is an alloy of copper (Cu) and zinc (Zn), in proportions which can be varied to achieve different mechanical, electrical, and chemical properties. It is a substitutional alloy: atoms of the two constituents may replace each other within the same crystal structure. Brass is similar to bronze, another copper alloy, that uses tin instead of zinc. Both bronze and brass may include small proportions of a range of other elements including arsenic (As), lead (Pb), phosphorus (P), aluminium (Al), manganese (Mn), and silicon (Si). Historically, the distinction between the two alloys has been less consistent and clear, and modern practice in museums and archaeology increasingly avoids both terms for historical objects in favor of the more general " copper alloy". Brass has long been a popular material for decoration due to its bright, gold-like appearance; being used for drawer pulls and doorknobs. It has also been widely used to make utensils because of its low melti ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Iron
Iron () is a chemical element with symbol Fe (from la, ferrum) and atomic number 26. It is a metal that belongs to the first transition series and group 8 of the periodic table. It is, by mass, the most common element on Earth, right in front of oxygen (32.1% and 30.1%, respectively), forming much of Earth's outer and inner core. It is the fourth most common element in the Earth's crust. In its metallic state, iron is rare in the Earth's crust, limited mainly to deposition by meteorites. Iron ores, by contrast, are among the most abundant in the Earth's crust, although extracting usable metal from them requires kilns or furnaces capable of reaching or higher, about higher than that required to smelt copper. Humans started to master that process in Eurasia during the 2nd millennium BCE and the use of iron tools and weapons began to displace copper alloys, in some regions, only around 1200 BCE. That event is considered the transition from the Bronze Age to the ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Laws Of Hywel Dda
''Cyfraith Hywel'' (; ''Laws of Hywel''), also known as Welsh law ( la, Leges Walliæ), was the system of law practised in medieval Wales before its final conquest by England. Subsequently, the Welsh law's criminal codes were superseded by the Statute of Rhuddlan in AD 1284 and its civil codes by Henry VIII's series of Laws in Wales Acts between 1535 and 1542. Welsh law was a form of Celtic law with many similarities to the Brehon law of Ireland and particularly the customs and terminology of the Britons of Strathclyde. It was passed down orally by jurists and bards and, according to tradition, only first codified during the reign of Hywel Dda in the mid-10th century. The earliest surviving manuscripts, however, are in Latin, date from the early 13th century, and show marked regional differences.Wade-Evans, Arthur. ''Welsh Medieval Law''. Oxford Univ., 1909. Accessed 1 Feb 2013. The law is only known to have been revised by a few rulers (particularly Bleddyn ap Cynfyn, who was ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Deheubarth
Deheubarth (; lit. "Right-hand Part", thus "the South") was a regional name for the realms of south Wales, particularly as opposed to Gwynedd (Latin: ''Venedotia''). It is now used as a shorthand for the various realms united under the House of Dinefwr, but that Deheubarth itself was not considered a proper kingdom on the model of Gwynedd, Powys, or Dyfed is shown by its rendering in Latin as ''dextralis pars'' or as ''Britonnes dexterales'' ("the Southern Britons") and not as a named land. In the oldest British writers, ''Deheubarth'' was used for ''all'' of modern Wales to distinguish it from ''Hen Ogledd'' ('' Y Gogledd''), the northern lands whence Cunedda and the Cymry originated. History Deheubarth was united around 920 by Hywel Dda out of the territories of Seisyllwg and Dyfed, which had come into his possession. Later on, the Kingdom of Brycheiniog was also added. Caerleon was previously the principal court of the area, but Hywel's dynasty fortified and built up a ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |
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Area
Area is the quantity that expresses the extent of a region on the plane or on a curved surface. The area of a plane region or ''plane area'' refers to the area of a shape or planar lamina, while ''surface area'' refers to the area of an open surface or the boundary of a three-dimensional object. Area can be understood as the amount of material with a given thickness that would be necessary to fashion a model of the shape, or the amount of paint necessary to cover the surface with a single coat. It is the two-dimensional analogue of the length of a curve (a one-dimensional concept) or the volume of a solid (a three-dimensional concept). The area of a shape can be measured by comparing the shape to squares of a fixed size. In the International System of Units (SI), the standard unit of area is the square metre (written as m2), which is the area of a square whose sides are one metre long. A shape with an area of three square metres would have the same area as three such squares. ... [...More Info...]       [...Related Items...]     OR:     [Wikipedia]   [Google]   [Baidu]   |