Yards

A yard (abbreviation: yd) is a unit of length in several different systems including United States customary units, Imperial units and the former English units. It is equal to 3 feet or 36 inches. Under an agreement in 1959 between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States, the yard (known as the "international yard" in the United States) was legally defined to be exactly 0.9144 metres.[3] Prior to that date, the legal definition of the yard when expressed in terms of metric units varied slightly from country to country. For purposes of measuring cloth, the early yard was divided by the binary method into two, four, eight and sixteen parts.[4] The two most common divisions were the fourth and sixteenth parts. The quarter of a yard was known as the "quarter" without further qualification, while the sixteenth of a yard was called a nail.[5] The eighth of a yard was sometimes called a finger,[6] but was more commonly referred to simply as an eighth of a yard, while the half-yard was called "half a yard".[7] The precise origin of the measure is not definitely known. Some believe it derived from the double cubit, or that it originated from cubic measure, others from its near equivalents, such as the length of a stride or pace. One postulate was that the yard was derived from the girth of a person's waist, while another claim held that the measure was invented by Henry I of England as being the distance between the tip of his nose and the end of his thumb.[14]

Tenth-century king Edgar the Peaceable is sometimes credited with having instituted the yard by a statute known as III Edgar 8.1, dated 959-63, from the Witenagemot at Andover. The statute, which survives in several variant manuscripts, says in effect that the measure of Winchester shall be observed throughout the realm. (A variant reading has it as Winchester and London.)[15][16][17] The chief proponents of the Edgar theory were Henry William Chisholm (Warden of the...