Measure
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a standard of measurement; a definite unit of capacity or extent, fixed by law or custom, in terms of which the relative sizes and capacities of things are ascertained and expressed; as, a foot, a yard, a mile are measures of length; a pint, a gallon, measures of capacity: a square foot, a measure of area; a cubic foot, a measure of volume, etc. See WEIGHTS AND MEASURES. In Music. The quantity of notes which are placed in the bar, and which is generally called the time, of which there are but two kinds, viz., common time, containing an equal quantity of notes in the bar, and triple time, containing an unequal quantity. Lineal Measure. The measure of lines or distances; the standard unit of lineal measure in the United States and in England is the yard. Unit of Measure. A given quantity, used as a standard of comparison in measuring a quantity of the same kind. Every kind of quantity has its own unit of measure, and under different circumstances the same kind of quantity may have different units of measure. Measure of Angles. The right angle being taken as the angular unit, its subdivisions are degrees, minutes and seconds. The right angle contains 90 degrees, the degree 60 minutes, and the minute 60 seconds. All smaller fractions are expressed decimally in terms of the second. The French have proposed to divide the right angle into 100 equal parts, called grades, but the suggestion has not been extensi extensively adopted. MEAT. See PACKING INDUSTRY. MEAT INSPECTION. See PACKING INDUSTRY.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Collier's in 1921 described measures as units "fixed by law or custom" and said the yard was the standard of length in both Britain and the United States — at that time a physical bar kept in a vault. Almost every such artefact standard has since been abolished: the international yard and pound agreement of 1959 defined the yard as exactly 0.9144 metre, the metre was tied to the speed of light in 1983, and in 2019 the last physical prototype, the kilogram cylinder near Paris, was retired in favour of a fixed value for the Planck constant. The metric system was reorganised as the SI in 1960 and is now the legal system almost everywhere, the United States being the conspicuous holdout in daily use. The entry's own prediction holds on one point: the French grade, dividing the right angle into 100 parts, is still little used outside surveying.
Written for this edition, 2026.