Eight stone make a hundredweight in the Imperial system science.
When used as the unit of measurement, the plural form of stone is correctly stone (as in, "11 stone"), though stones is sometimes used, but not usually by British natives. The abbreviation is st. When describing the units, the correct plural is stones laptop (as in, "Please enter your weight in stones and pounds").
stone
History
The stone was originally used for weighing agricultural commodities. Historically the number of pounds in a stone varied by commodity, and was not the same in all times and places even for one commodity. Potatoes, for example, were traditionally sold in stone and half-stone (14-pound and 7-pound) quantities but the OED contains examples[1] including:
Commodity
Number of Pounds
Wool
14, 15, 24
Wax
12
Sugr and spice
8
Befand Mutton
8
Another example is the definition of the "stone" in the 1772 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica[2] which reads "STONE also denotes a certain quantity or weight of some commodities. A stone of beef, in London, is the quantity of eight pounds; in Hertfordshire, twelve pounds; in Scotland sixteen pounds."
[edit] Current use
Although the 1985 Weights and Measures Act[3] expressly prohibited the use of the stone as a unit of measure for purposes of trade (other than as a supplementary unit), the stone remains widely used within the United Kingdom as a means of expressing human body weight. People in these countries normally describe themselves as weighing, for example, "11 stone 4" (11 stone and 4 pounds), rather than "72 kilograms" in most other countries, or "158 pounds" (the conventional way of expressing the same weight in the United States and Canada).
Its widespread colloquial use may be compared to the persistence in the United Kingdom of other Imperial units like the foot, the inch, and the mile, despite these having been supplanted entirely or partly by metric units in official use and other contexts. Thus on a National Health Service Web site the user may select either metric and Imperial units,[4] but the law requires that if this information is officially recorded, then such records shall be in metric units.[5]
Outside the United Kingdom, stone may also be used to express body weight in casual contexts in other Commonwealth countries.
[edit] See also
Body weight
Conversion of units
English unit
History of measurement
