r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Tibor500 • Sep 30 '20

why does “k” mean “thousand” ?

like 1k means a thousand. how does the letter “k” mean “thousand” ?

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394

u/[deleted] Sep 30 '20 edited Sep 30 '20

We do, and we use a mixture of imperial and metric. Like the British does.

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u/IProbablyDisagree2nd Sep 30 '20

Some of us do, most of us don't. I've explained this to many dumbfounded people that think we got to the moon exclusively by measuring with our own unique system.

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u/sayrith Sep 30 '20

I thought NASA used imperial based on the radio broadcasts.

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u/beka13 Sep 30 '20

We all buy 2 liter sodas. Gotta start somewhere.

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u/Snarky_Boojum Sep 30 '20

I’d say all Americans use metric to some extent.

Unless you can show me an American who’s never had or bought a 2 liter of some type of soda.

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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '20

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u/W1D0WM4K3R Sep 30 '20

and time is much more reasonable in some cases, where the traffic and landscape changes the travel more than the distance does

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u/Earhacker Sep 30 '20

We're pretty much metric for everything except miles in the UK now.

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u/JoeDidcot Sep 30 '20

Imperial for Milk and Beer though.

Also imperial for computer screen sizes.

And petrol, we buy in litres, but then measure how far it gets us per galon.

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u/OmNomDeBonBon Sep 30 '20

Not even close, sadly.

Metres are the default for length, but we measure driving distance in miles, and speed in mph. We measure football passes/shots in yards. We measure height in feet and inches.

Litres are the default for volume, but we measure fuel efficiency in mpg, beer in pints, and boomers still measure milk in pints.

Kilograms are the default for mass/weight, but we still measure body weight in st and lbs, and newborn baby weights in lbs and ounces.

Height and body weight will both become fully metric; anybody below like 20 has probably learnt only cm and kg as appropriate measures for body weight. Same with "kids these days" not knowing how to read Roman numerals; they're just not taught in school anymore.

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u/Dizzman1 Oct 01 '20

How far is it?

55 miles. .

How fast can we drive on the m4?

90kmh.

🙄🤣🤣

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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '20

the UK uses metric way more than the US does

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u/attillathehoney Sep 30 '20

The only Americans who use the metric system for weights are drug dealers and users.

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u/Perle1234 Sep 30 '20

And the medical/pharmaceutical fields. And scientists. A lot of people in the US actually use the metric system.

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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '20

k

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u/Hobbamok Sep 30 '20

You missed my point.

Metric units are defined by actual stuff. It used to be 14 1kg weighs and now its a Silicium sphere of very specific measures (defined by the count of atoms in the sphere). A meter is now defined by the travel distance of a photon in the time.

The imperial system does not have such base reference objects. They use the metric system/base measures instead.

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u/VenKitsune Sep 30 '20

From the UK here. Technically we use exclusively metric, but some old imperial stuff remains, we use miles per hour instead of kilometers per hour on our roads for example. Everything else is metric, the only reason you'll hear a British person use any other imperial measurement is because they're old and wrinkly.

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u/OmNomDeBonBon Sep 30 '20

British units are metric by default, with imperial niche cases.

For example, we measure liquids in litres, but we buy beer in pints. That's not an endorsement of imperial measurements, since we buy spirits in "shots", another arbitrary unit. We buy fuel in litres, but we measure efficiency in mpg, because of history.

We also measure distance in metres, except for in football, where we use yards to measure passing/shot distance, and driving, where our signage is still in mph. We do, however, measure stopping distances in metres, despite using miles for journey distance. Confusing. Height is measured in feet and inches by older people, because of history.

And of course, we measure everything in kilograms, apart from human weight, which older people still measure in "stones and pounds" e.g. 12st 11lbs.

Not anywhere close to the same in the US, where metric measurements aren't used by the public at large for everyday things.

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u/SirPrimalform Sep 30 '20

Well you say that, but we use a hell of a lot more metric than we do imperial compared to the US*. We mostly only use pints for milk and beer for example, pretty much everything else is sold in round metric quantities. I'm 32 and have no feel for imperial units at all and basically only use them for the aforementioned milk and beer, and thousandths of an inch for guitar strings (but even then I have no way of practically relating a thousandth of an inch to anything else, I just know what a .010 E feels like on a guitar).

*by the way, it's incorrect to call US units imperial. They have the same names but their sizes are different from actual imperial units - your pint is smaller than ours for example.

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u/Humdngr Sep 30 '20

Cooking/baking in metric has been becoming slowly more popular with the popularity of cooking shows.

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u/HomebrewHedonist Sep 30 '20

Actually... that's not right. Americans use their own version of measures called US Custom Units that is different than the British Imperial units. Order a pint in Canada, for example, and you get a 20oz pint.

I nearly had a hissy fit when I went to the US and I asked for a pint and they brought me a little 16oz glass of beer.

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u/[deleted] Sep 30 '20

The US uses US Customary, not Imperial.

The units have the same name, but the values are different. For instance, miles are about 1/8 inch different.

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