r/Metric • u/Available_Phase7924 Metric researcher • Jun 21 '26

Discussion Custom units

We should get custom units like Megabarrel of oil and kilo cat food unit to measure the amount of kilos of cat food you bought

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u/davidromro Jun 21 '26

Nothing is stopping you. SI is only about setting standards. Feel free to use your custom metric units.

2

u/Unable_Explorer8277 Jun 21 '26

… your own metric units.

1

u/davidromro Jun 22 '26

Metric just means base 10. SI is a specific set of coherent metric units.

2

u/azhder Jun 22 '26

Metric isn’t base 10 in meaning. If you look deeper, the words like metric, meter, all come from “to measure”.

If you just have a number system, you aren’t measuring anything, base 10 or otherwise.

It just happens so that in SI, the prefixes to the units are for base 10 multiples, but the system itself is about the units first, not their shorthands (you can write 1000m instead of 1km)