Quintal

The quintal or centner is a historical unit of mass with many different definitions in different countries, but usually it is 100 base units of mass, e.g. pounds.

Both terms share their roots in the Classical Latin "centenarius", meaning "hundredlike", but the "quintal" has a convoluted etymology: It became Late Latin "centenarium pondus", then in succession, Late Greek, "kentenarion", Arabic, "qintar", Mediæval Latin, "quintale", and finally Old French "quintal" before passing into the English language. The word "centner", on the other hand, is just a Germanicized form of "centenarius".

The unit was and still is used in the Arab world, where it is known as the "qintar". It is currently defined informally as 50 kg. The "qintar" was reimported to Europe by traders.

In France it used to be defined as 100 "livres" (pounds), about 48.95 kg, and has later been redefined as 100 kg ("mesures usuelles"), thus called "metric quintal" with symbol "qq". In Spain it is still defined as 100 "libras", or about 46 kg, but the "metric quintal" is also defined as 100 kg [Real Academia Española's [http://buscon.rae.es/draeI/SrvltGUIBusUsual?TIPO_HTML=2&TIPO_BUS=3&LEMA=quintal definition of "quintal"] ] ; in Portugal a quintal is 128 "libras" or about 58.75 kg. In English both, "quintal" and "centner", were once alternate names for the hundredweight and thus defined either as 100 lb (exactly 45.359237 kg) or as 112 lb (about 50.84 kg). Also, in Dominican Republic it is about 125 lb.

In India, the quintal is equivalent to 100 kg and is a standard measurement of mass for agricultural products.

The quintal was defined in the United States in 1866 [ Act of July 28, 1866, codified in 15 U.S.C. §205 [http://fatty.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode15/usc_sec_15_00000205----000-notes.html] ] as 100 kilograms. However, this is not in use and though it still appears in the statute, it has been declared obsolete by NIST. ["Metric System of Measurement: Interpretation of the International System of Units for the United States", Federal Register notice of July 28, 1998, 63 F.R. 40333 [http://ts.nist.gov/ts/htdocs/200/202/SIFedReg.pdf] ]

100 kilograms centner and "centner per hectare" were also common units used in Soviet Union's agriculture and are used now in ex-USSR states.

References

ee also

*Zentner