A verst (russian: верста, ) is an obsolete Russian unit of length defined as 500

sazhen A native system of weights and measures was used in Imperial Russia and after the Russian Revolution, but it was abandoned after 21 July 1925, when the Soviet Union adopted the metric system, per the order of the Council of People's Commissars ...

. This makes a verst equal to .

Plurals and variants

In the

English language English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples that migrated to the ...

, ''verst'' is singular with the normal plural ''versts''. In Russian, the

nominative In grammar, the nominative case ( abbreviated ), subjective case, straight case or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb or (in Latin and formal variants of Eng ...

singular Singular may refer to: * Singular, the grammatical number that denotes a unit quantity, as opposed to the plural and other forms * Singular homology * SINGULAR, an open source Computer Algebra System (CAS) * Singular or sounder, a group of boar ...

is , but the form usually used with numbers is the

genitive In grammar, the genitive case ( abbreviated ) is the grammatical case that marks a word, usually a noun, as modifying another word, also usually a noun—thus indicating an attributive relationship of one noun to the other noun. A genitive can a ...

plural The plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated pl., pl, or ), in many languages, is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than the ...

– 10 verst, 25 verst, etc. – whence the English form. A (russian: межевая верста, literally 'border verst') is twice as long as a verst. "The verst of the 17th century was 700

s or 1.49 km as against the 500 sazhens or 1.067 km it became at the time of

Peter the Great Peter I ( – ), most commonly known as Peter the Great,) or Pyotr Alekséyevich ( rus, Пётр Алексе́евич, p=ˈpʲɵtr ɐlʲɪˈksʲejɪvʲɪtɕ, , group=pron was a Russian monarch who ruled the Tsardom of Russia from t ...

Finnish ''virsta''

Finland Finland ( fi, Suomi ; sv, Finland ), officially the Republic of Finland (; ), is a Nordic country in Northern Europe. It shares land borders with Sweden to the northwest, Norway to the north, and Russia to the east, with the Gulf of Bot ...

, a was originally 1,068.84 m according to the Swedish standard, but the Russian verst of 1,066.8 m replaced it after the province was annexed to the Russian Empire in 1809. A was originally 600 (fathoms, 1.781 m), but was then changed to 500 , since the Russian was longer, 2.134 m. A Finnish was defined as of a , the Finnish language name for the pre-metric Swedish '' mil'', used in Finland since the early 17th century (see

Obsolete Finnish units of measurement The obsolete Finnish units of measurement consist mostly of a variety of units traditionally used in Finland that are similar to those that were traditionally used in other countries and are still used in the United Kingdom ( imperial units) and ...

). Metrication replaced with the

kilometre The kilometre ( SI symbol: km; or ), spelt kilometer in American English, is a unit of length in the International System of Units (SI), equal to one thousand metres (kilo- being the SI prefix for ). It is now the measurement unit used for ...

in the 1880s.Konu, Mia. ''Palvelukseen halutaan yksi raitis imettäjä - notiiseja ja reklaameja 1800-luvun sanomalehdistä''. Nemo, Helsinki 2009.

References

External links

{{wiktionary
Conversion table
Units of length Customary units of measurement