Talk:Inch

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Do I see this wrong, or are the French and Italian words for thumb also the same as the word for inch, like in Dutch?

Another thing, that one can read between the lines but isn't stated, is that probably the inch and the foot (the one a thumb the other a foot) were originally not related but adapted so that one is exactly 12 times the other (a dozen; a number that used to play the role of the number 10 these days). DirkvdM 07:11, 13 August 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Abbreviation

Shouldn't there be a tie-in with the use of caliber (.22, .38, etc)?

What is the correct abbreviation? in?

How do I say square inch? in²? --Abdull 12:41, 16 September 2005 (UTC) 208.126.51.37 (talk)

Yes. Yes. Gene Nygaard 13:26, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
in. is an older form of jbvi;abbreviation that can be found. It follows the Enlgish practice that the full stop replaces the missing part of the word eg "Capt." "Maj."GraemeLeggett 15:05, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox

I made an infobox; see its talk page for discussion. -Branddobbe 07:32, 18 October 2005 (UTC)


[edit] Non-alphabetic symbols

I am from Germany and i read about a girl who is 5'3" tall. So is she 5 foot and 3 inch tall?

Yes, she is 1,60 m. If you had read this article or Zoll you should have known. Christoph Päper

[edit] actual sizes of other inches.

ok so the modern international inch (and it seems from the text the old canadian inch) is exactly 2.54 cm but what about the other inches? how different were they?Plugwash 20:38, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

See Systems_of_measurement#Medieval_European_measurements and compare the links. 惑乱 分からん 01:33, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Swedish decimal inch

Is this still used in land surveying? I would have guessed Sweden would survey in Metric by today... 惑乱 分からん 01:33, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

I've never heard of such a thing, but then again I dont work in land surveying. Inches/thumbs are used in construction though. // Lars

[edit] Sub-unit of an inch

What is the unit for sub-dividing an inch into 16 equal parts ?

Sixteenths of an inch, i.e. 1/16th [of an inch], 1/8th [which is really 2/16th], 3/16, etc. I don't think there is a formal name. It is not uncommon in tooling to see the inch fractionized into 64ths. MJCdetroit 15:46, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
There are some very obsolete units like the barleycorn - which is a third of an inch - but I don't think there is a 1/16th inch unit. SteveBaker 15:13, 15 May 2007 (UTC)
You're correct in that there is not a formal unit name. I should have been a little clearer by saying it is commonly fractionalized into smaller amounts. MJCdetroit 15:33, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Personal height in Canada

In Canada, the trend has been shifting towards metres, as shown on a person's driver's license. [In referring to personal height]

Is there any truth to this? In my own personal experience, I have never heard an English speaking Canadian refer to their height in terms of metres. On Hockey Night in Canada, I have never heard a hockey player's height described in anything but feet and inches. In fairness, most of the Canadians I know are in Southwest Ontario. I don't know if it is different in other parts of English speaking Canada. —MJCdetroit 15:59, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Official documents tend to be in metric, since the country is officially metric. However, many people are still familiar with the imperial system so the old units are commonly used. In Quebec, there is a slight tendency to prefer metric to imperial, as it has less to do with any British history. Michael Daly 20:10, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Equivalence table

Maybe the table should be corrected so that 1 inch = 0.0254 m, so that it shows all the significant figures (except for the infinite zeros trailing behind) Knights who say ni 17:27, 7 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The inch in metric units

The article states that "The United States and Canada each had their own, different, definition of the inch, defined in terms of metric units. The Canadian inch was defined to be equal to 25.4 millimetres." Therefore, is the old Canadian inch the current international inch? SteveSims 06:04, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Inch vs. Metric

I'm English and we learnt the metric system in school; centimetres and metres. It was oddd learnig feet and inches after moving to the U.S. And like Canada it seems, we brits measure height in feet and inches and often use 'miles' too.

prince 07:16, 19 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Measuring tape image caption

The caption below the image of the measuring tape says that the tape is capable of measuring down to "1/32th of an inch", but shouldn't this be "1/32nd of an inch"? A small detail i know, but 32th doesn't read very well at all. I've held off changing it though, just in case all inch subdivision fractions should use "th" JieBie 08:52, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

Fixed.--agr 14:04, 7 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Infobox

I don't like that the infobox shows decimal units for the number of inches in a foot/yard/mile. Those are approximations only - the true definitions (ie 1/12th ft, 1/32nd yd, etc) should be given. That is both clearer and more accurate (indeed infinitely accurate) - and would be far less confusing to someone coming from the metric world who truly wants to know how many inches there are in a yard or whatever. You could put the decimal expansions afterwards or something - but the way it is now sucks. SteveBaker 15:10, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Vandalism or what?

I noticed that older version of the text are way much longer. What was the reason of massive deletions? Laudak 22:00, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree that the older version is much better, and have restored it. I specifically came to the inch page hoping to find the historical origin of the unit which is in the older version and not in the newer one. David s graff (talk) 15:27, 22 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Age of 40

I assume that wikipedia articles aren't supposed to grow increasingly inaccurate with time by definition, so the phrase in the opening paragraph that people over the age of 40 in Australia probably should be changed to people born before a certain year/decade. I would change it myself, but have no source for the statistic except the article itself, and I don't want to try to figure out when that was added. 65.4.121.187 (talk) 23:39, 29 February 2008 (UTC)