This time I might just go too far — it depends on how well I read my tape measure. That’s because this week we’re going to take a look at terms for size and distance, how the names for some measurements came about, and the ways in which people have confused them.
King Henry VIII’s hand was the standard for the length of measure known as a hand, equivalent to 4 inches.
We all know how far a mile is — it’s too far to walk, so let’s take the car. Most of us also know that a mile consists of 5,280 feet. But that wasn’t always the case. Back in ancient Rome a mile consisted of “mille passus” or 1,000 paces as measured by every other step (i.e., every time the left foot hit the ground). That was estimated to be about 4,851 of today’s feet. During the reign of Queen Elizabeth I in 1593 the mile grew to its current length, a distance that was standardized in 1959.
Additionally, a mile is made up of eight furlongs, each of which is 660 feet long, having expanded slightly from the earlier German distance of 625 feet. (A furlong, you wonder? It started as an old English term describing the length of the furrow in one acre of a plowed field.)
When is a mile not a mile? When it’s a nautical mile, which extends one minute (1/60th of a degree) on the earth’s surface. That makes the nautical mile 6,076 feet long, or 1.15 regular miles.
A kilometer is .62 of a mile and, as its name implies, is made up of 1,000 meters. Once thought to be 1/10,000,000th of the distance between the North Pole and the equator on a line that passes through Paris (no lie), a meter is about three-and-a-half inches longer than a yard.
Whether or not a yard was originally the length of King Henry I’s arm, as we all know these days it consists of 36 inches, or three feet.
Two yards, which were once said to be the length of a man’s outstretched arms, equal a fathom, which is an old English measure of length or depth equal to 1/1,000th of a nautical mile. And two fathoms of water is “mark twain,” which is enough to allow for the safe passage of a steamship (and how the great writer, who worked as a ship’s pilot, supposedly came up with his pen name).
The Seattle Mariners baseball team managed to put the fathom to good use on dry land by using it to measure the distance to their outfield wall (for example, 52.7 fathoms is the distance down the left field line, or 316 feet).
In early Rome a foot was originally 11.65 inches long. It was later divided into 12 equal “unciae,” which gave us the words “inch” and “ounce.” Not surprisingly, it really floors me (you’ll see what I did there) when someone says that, for instance, a 6-foot-by-6-foot rug is six square feet when it’s actually six feet square and has an area of 36 square feet.
Equestrians aren’t horsing around when they talk about how many hands high their handsome horses are. A hand is four inches, which is about what you’d get by measuring across the palm and thumb of one hand. (It was a statute of King Henry VIII of England that established the hand at four inches.)
As noted above, one inch is 1/12th of a foot. It is also 25.4 millimeters long which, as any old bicycle mechanic will tell you, means that six millimeters equal about a quarter of an inch, and if he can’t find his 13-millimeter spanner in the clutter on his workbench, all he has to do is come up with his half-inch wrench.
That’s all for now because I’ve used up all my column inches.
Jim Witherell of Lewiston is a writer and lover of words whose work includes “L.L. Bean: The Man and His Company” and “Ed Muskie: Made in Maine.”
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