The stone or stone weight (abbreviation: st.) is an English and imperial unit of mass equal to 14 pounds (6.35 kg). The stone continues in customary use in the United Kingdom for

body weight Human body weight is a person's mass or weight. Strictly speaking, body weight is the measurement of weight without items located on the person. Practically though, body weight may be measured with clothes on, but without shoes or heavy accessor ...

. England and other Germanic-speaking countries of northern Europe formerly used various standardised "stones" for trade, with their values ranging from about 5 to 40 local pounds (roughly 3 to 15 kg) depending on the location and objects weighed. With the advent of metrication, Europe's various "stones" were superseded by or adapted to the kilogram from the mid-19th century on.

Antiquity

The name "stone" derives from the use of stones for weights, a practice that dates back into antiquity. The Biblical law against the carrying of "diverse weights, a large and a small" is more literally translated as "you shall not carry a stone and a stone (), a large and a small". There was no standardised "stone" in the ancient Jewish world, but in Roman times stone weights were crafted to multiples of the Roman pound. Such weights varied in quality: the

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holds 10 and 50-pound examples of polished

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, while a 40-pound example at the Eschborn Museum is made of sandstone.

Great Britain and Ireland

The 1772 edition of the '' Encyclopædia Britannica'' defined the stone: Encyclopædia Britannica Vol III, Edinburgh1772.

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.

The Weights and Measures Act of 1824, which applied to all of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, consolidated the weights and measures legislation of several centuries into a single document. It revoked the provision that bales of wool should be made up of 20 stones, each of 14 pounds, but made no provision for the continued use of the stone. Ten years later, a stone still varied from 5 pounds (glass) to 8 pounds (meat and fish) to 14 pounds (wool and "horseman's weight"). The Act of 1835 permitted using a stone of 14 pounds for trade but other values remained in use. James Britten, in 1880 for example, catalogued a number of different values of the stone in various British towns and cities, ranging from 4 lb to 26 lb. The value of the stone and associated units of measure that were legalised for purposes of trade were clarified by the Weights and Measures Act 1835 as follows:

England

The English stone under law varied by commodity and in practice varied according to local standards. The Assize of Weights and Measures, a

statute of uncertain date The statutes of uncertain date, also known as ''statuta incerti temporis'' or ''Certain Statutes made during the Reigns of K. Henry 3. K. Edward 1. or K. Edward 2. but uncertain when or in which of their times'', are British (previously English) s ...

from , describes stones of 5 merchants' pounds used for glass; stones of 8 lb. used for beeswax,

sugar Sugar is the generic name for sweet-tasting, soluble carbohydrates, many of which are used in food. Simple sugars, also called monosaccharides, include glucose, fructose, and galactose. Compound sugars, also called disaccharides or double ...

pepper Pepper or peppers may refer to: Food and spice * Piperaceae or the pepper family, a large family of flowering plant ** Black pepper * ''Capsicum'' or pepper, a genus of flowering plants in the nightshade family Solanaceae ** Bell pepper ** Chili ...

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) (''Cuminum cyminum'') is a

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s,. & &

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, and nutmegs; stones of 12 lb. used for lead; and the of lb. used for wool. In 1350

Edward III Edward III (13 November 1312 – 21 June 1377), also known as Edward of Windsor before his accession, was King of England and Lord of Ireland from January 1327 until his death in 1377. He is noted for his military success and for restoring r ...

issued a new statute defining the stone weight, to be used for wool and "other Merchandizes", at 14 pounds, reaffirmed by Henry VII in 1495. In England, merchants traditionally sold potatoes in half-stone increments of 7 pounds. Live animals were weighed in stones of 14 lb; but, once slaughtered, their carcasses were weighed in stones of 8 lb. Thus, if the animal's carcass accounted for of the animal's weight, the butcher could return the dressed carcasses to the animal's owner stone for stone, keeping the offal, blood and hide as his due for slaughtering and dressing the animal.

Smithfield market Smithfield, properly known as West Smithfield, is a district located in Central London, part of Farringdon Without, the most westerly ward of the City of London, England. Smithfield is home to a number of City institutions, such as St Bartho ...

continued to use the 8 lb stone for meat until shortly before the Second World War. The '' Oxford English Dictionary'' also lists:''Oxford English Dictionary'', 1st ed.
stone, ''n.'', §14a"
Oxford University Press (Oxford), 1917.

Scotland

The Scottish stone was equal to 16 Scottish pounds (17 lb 8 oz avoirdupois or 7.936 kg). In 1661, the Royal Commission of Scotland recommended that the Troy stone be used as a standard of weight and that it be kept in the custody of the burgh of Lanark. The tron (or local) stone of Edinburgh, also standardised in 1661, was 16 tron pounds (22 lb 1 oz avoirdupois or 9.996 kg). In 1789 an encyclopedic enumeration of measurements was printed for the use of "his Majesty's Sheriffs and Stewards Depute, and Justices of Peace, ... and to the Magistrates of the Royal Boroughs of Scotland" and provided a county-by-county and commodity-by-commodity breakdown of values and conversions for the stone and other measures. The Scots stone ceased to be used for trade when the Act of 1824 established a uniform system of measure across the whole of the United Kingdom, which at that time included all of Ireland.

Ireland

Before the early 19th century, as in England, the stone varied both with locality and with commodity. For example, the '' Belfast stone'' for measuring flax equaled 16.75 avoirdupois pounds. The most usual value was 14 pounds. Among the oddities related to the use of the stone was the practice in County Clare of a stone of potatoes being 16 lb in the summer and 18 lb in the winter.

Modern use

In 1965 the

Federation of British Industry The Federation of British Industries (FBI) was an employers' association in the United Kingdom. Founded by the Midlands industrialist Dudley Docker in 1916 as the United British Industries' Association, but renamed later that same year, it was ini ...

informed the British government that its members favoured adopting the metric system. The

Board of Trade The Board of Trade is a British government body concerned with commerce and industry, currently within the Department for International Trade. Its full title is The Lords of the Committee of the Privy Council appointed for the consideration of ...

, on behalf of the government, agreed to support a ten-year metrication programme. There would be minimal legislation, as the programme was to be voluntary and costs were to be borne where they fell. Under the guidance of the

Metrication Board The Metrication Board was a non-departmental public body that existed in the United Kingdom to promote and co-ordinate metrication within the country. It was set up in 1969, four years after the metrication programme was announced, and wound dow ...

, the agricultural product markets achieved a voluntary switchover by 1976. The stone was not included in the Directive 80/181/EEC as a unit of measure that could be used within the EEC for "economic, public health, public safety or administrative purposes", though its use as a "supplementary unit" was permitted. The scope of the directive was extended to include all aspects of the EU internal market from 1 January 2010. With the adoption of metric units by the agricultural sector, the stone was, in practice, no longer used for trade; and, in the Weights and Measures Act 1985, passed in compliance with EU directive 80/181/EEC, the stone was removed from the list of units permitted for trade in the United Kingdom. In 1983, in response to the same directive, similar legislation was passed in Ireland. The Act repealed earlier acts that defined the stone as a unit of measure for trade. (British law had previously been silent regarding other uses of the stone.) The stone remains widely used in the UK and Ireland for human body weight: in those countries people may commonly be said to weigh, e.g., "11 stone 4" (11 stones and 4 pounds), rather than "72 kilograms" as in most of the other countries, or "158 pounds", the conventional way of expressing the same weight in the US. The correct plural form of ''stone'' in this context is ''stone'' (as in, "11 stone" or "12 stone 6 pounds"); in other contexts, the correct plural is ''stones'' (as in, "Please enter your weight in stones and pounds"). In Australia and New Zealand, metrication has almost entirely displaced stones and pounds since the 1970s. In many sports in both Britain and Ireland, such as professional boxing, wrestling, and horse racing, the stone is used to express body weights.

Elsewhere

The use of the stone in the British Empire was varied. In Canada for example, it never had a legal status. Shortly after the United States declared independence, Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State, presented a report on weights and measures to the U.S. House of Representatives. Even though all the weights and measures in use in the United States at the time were derived from English weights and measures, his report made no mention of the stone being used. He did, however, propose a decimal system of weights in which his " ecimalpound" would have been and the " ecimalstone" would have been . Fotothek df tg 0000212 Waage

Before the advent of metrication, units called "stone" (german: Stein; nl, steen; pl, kamień) were used in many northwestern European countries. Its value, usually between 3 and 10 kg, varied from city to city and sometimes from commodity to commodity. The number of local "pounds" in a stone also varied from city to city. During the early 19th century, states such as the Netherlands (including Belgium) and the South Western German states, which had redefined their system of measures using the as a reference for weight (mass), also redefined their stone to align it with the kilogram. This table shows a selection of stones from various northern European cities:

Metric stone

In the Netherlands, where the metric system was adopted in 1817, the ''pond'' (pound) was set equal to a

kilogram The kilogram (also kilogramme) is the unit of mass in the International System of Units (SI), having the unit symbol kg. It is a widely used measure in science, engineering and commerce worldwide, and is often simply called a kilo colloquially ...

, and the ''steen'' (stone), which had previously been 8 Amsterdam pond (3.953 kg), was redefined as being 3 kg. In modern colloquial Dutch, a ''pond'' is used as an alternative for 500 grams or half a kilogram, while the ''ons'' is used for a weight of 100 grams, being ''pond''.

Notes

References

External links

UK: The Units of Measurement Regulations 1995
* https://www.britannica.com/science/stone-unit-of-weight {{Imperial units Units of mass Stone (weight) Imperial units