Stone (unit)

–era tri-lingual inscription. 9,950g Museum's 2nd-century stone weight of 40 Roman pounds (c. 13 kg), beside an ID-1-sized card for scale The name "stone" derives from the historical 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. 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: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 1824 (5 Geo. 4. c. 74), 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 Weights and Measures Act 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. cinnamon, and nutmegs; stones of 12 lb. used for lead; and the of  lb. used for wool. for estimating cattle carcass weights, calibrated in stones of 20, , 8 and 14 pounds 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 continued to use the 8 lb stone for meat until shortly before the Second World War. The most usual value was 14 pounds. Under the guidance of the Metrication Board, the agricultural product markets achieved a voluntary switchover by 1976. In 1983, in response to the same directive, similar legislation was passed in Ireland. The invariant 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 entirely displaced stones and pounds since the 1970s. In many sports in both the UK and Ireland, such as professional boxing, wrestling, and horse racing,{{cite web ==Elsewhere==

The use of the stone in the former 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 "[decimal] pound" would have been and the "[decimal] stone" would have been .{{cite book 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 half a kilogram, 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. == See also ==