The catty, kati or , pronounced as jin in Mandarin and gan in Cantonese, is a traditional Chinese unit of

mass Mass is an intrinsic property of a body. It was traditionally believed to be related to the quantity of matter in a physical body, until the discovery of the atom and particle physics. It was found that different atoms and different elementar ...

used across

East East or Orient is one of the four cardinal directions or points of the compass. It is the opposite direction from west and is the direction from which the Sun rises on the Earth. Etymology As in other languages, the word is formed from the fa ...

and

Southeast Asia Southeast Asia, also spelled South East Asia and South-East Asia, and also known as Southeastern Asia, South-eastern Asia or SEA, is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, south-eastern region of Asia, consistin ...

, notably for weighing food and other groceries in some

wet markets A wet market (also called a public market or a traditional market) is a marketplace selling fresh foods such as meat, fish as food, fish, greengrocer, produce and other consumption-oriented shelf life, perishable goods in a non-supermarket sett ...

, street markets, and shops. Related units include the

picul A picul or tam is a traditional Asian unit of weight, defined as "as much as a man can carry on a shoulder-pole". History The word ''picul'' appeared as early as the mid 9th century in Javanese. Following Spanish, Portuguese, British and m ...

, equal to 100 catties, and the

tael Tael (),"Tael" entry
at the

Malay Malay may refer to: Languages * Malay language or Bahasa Melayu, a major Austronesian language spoken in Indonesia, Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore ** History of the Malay language, the Malay language from the 4th to the 14th century ** Indonesi ...

Indonesian Indonesian is anything of, from, or related to Indonesia, an archipelagic country in Southeast Asia. It may refer to: * Indonesians, citizens of Indonesia ** Native Indonesians, diverse groups of local inhabitants of the archipelago ** Indonesian ...

), which is of a catty. A

stone In geology, rock (or stone) is any naturally occurring solid mass or aggregate of minerals or mineraloid matter. It is categorized by the minerals included, its Chemical compound, chemical composition, and the way in which it is formed. Rocks ...

is a former unit used in Hong Kong equal to 120 catties and a ''gwan'' (鈞) is 30 catties. Catty or ''kati'' is still used in Southeast Asia as a unit of measurement in some contexts especially by the significant

Overseas Chinese Overseas Chinese () refers to people of Chinese birth or ethnicity who reside outside Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. As of 2011, there were over 40.3 million overseas Chinese. Terminology () or ''Hoan-kheh'' () in Hokkien, refe ...

populations across the region, particularly in Malaysia and Singapore. The catty is traditionally equivalent to around

pound avoirdupois The pound or pound-mass is a unit of mass used in British imperial and United States customary systems of measurement. Various definitions have been used; the most common today is the international avoirdupois pound, which is legally define ...

, formalised as 604.78982

gram The gram (originally gramme; SI unit symbol g) is a Physical unit, unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI) equal to one one thousandth of a kilogram. Originally defined as of 1795 as "the absolute weight of a volume of pure wate ...

s in Hong Kong, 604.79 grams in Malaysia and 604.8 grams in Singapore. In some countries, the weight has been rounded to 600 grams (Taiwan, Japan, Korea and Thailand). In

mainland China "Mainland China" is a geopolitical term defined as the territory governed by the People's Republic of China (including islands like Hainan or Chongming), excluding dependent territories of the PRC, and other territories within Greater China. ...

, the catty (more commonly translated as jin within China) has been rounded to 500 grams and is referred to as the market catty (市斤 ''shìjīn'') in order to distinguish it from the "common catty" (公斤 ''gōngjīn''), or kilogram, and it is subdivided into 10 taels rather than the usual 16.

Etymology

The word ''catty'' comes from Malay ''kati'', meaning the weight. It has also been borrowed into English as ''caddy'', meaning a container for storing tea.

References

{{reflist Chinese units in Hong Kong Units of mass

Etymology

See also

References