Steelyard
2 of the 6 encyclopedias on this shelf carry an entry for Steelyard. Both are reproduced below, so you can see where they agree and where they differ.
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a place in London in which at an early date the merchants of the Hanseatic League maintained immense warehouses for the sale of their goods. The topic is of interest chiefly for the caution it lends not to be hasty in concluding that words are related because they are spelled alike. The first syllable of the name is a corruption of stael, meaning a leather tag or seal affixed to a bolt of cloth as a certificate of proper dyeing. In 1597 the London merchants, desiring the business for themselves, secured the passage of an act driving the Hanse merchants from the city. Staelyard became corrupted to Steelyard, and still later popular tradition had it that the place was called Steelyard because it was formerly a yard for the sale of steel and iron. Then by a curious, and, we may say, an ignorant, association of terms, for the word is of a wholly different origin, the common steelyard or bar used as a balance in weighing was said to derive its name from its early employment by the Hanse merchants in weighing out steel to their customers. This false history of the word "steelyard" was current for a century.
Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)
a balance or weighing machine consisting of a lever with unequal arms. It is of two kinds. The common steelyard, or Roman balance, is formed by suspending the article to be weighed from the end of the shorter arm, or placing it in a scale depending therefrom and sliding a determinate weight along the longer one till an equilibrium is obtained. The longer arm is so graduated that the figure opposite to which the weight rests indicates the weight of the article at the extremity of the shorter arm. The second form is the Danish balance, which differs from the Roman in having the counterpoise fixed at one end and the fulcrum slid along the graduated beam.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Both accounts still stand in their essentials. The London Steelyard that Aiton's described in 1910 had already vanished: the Hanseatic League's riverside compound, whose privileges Elizabeth I revoked at the end of the 1590s, was sold in the 1850s and built over by Cannon Street railway station in 1866, so nothing of it is visible today. Aiton's confident derivation from stael, a cloth seal, is less settled than it sounds u2013 modern dictionaries treat the origin of the name (German Stalhof) as uncertain, while agreeing with Aiton on the main point, that the weighing instrument and the London wharf are unrelated words. The balance Collier's set out in 1921, Roman and Danish forms alike, works exactly as described and is still sold for weighing luggage, game and fish, though for trade and industry it has been almost wholly displaced by electronic load-cell scales.
Written for this edition, 2026.