Quarter

What the unit was used for

The quarter shows how one word did two jobs in the same market.

As a dry measure it is eight bushels and the wholesale unit of the English grain trade: corn was bought and sold by the quarter well into the 20th century, and Victorian newspapers quote grain prices in shillings per quarter.

As a weight it is a quarter of a hundredweight, 28 pounds or exactly 12.70058636 kg, sitting between the stone and the hundredweight.

The name means one fourth in both cases, but of different parent units, so a reader meeting “a quarter of wheat” in a document has to work out whether the context is volume or weight.

In the system

1 quarter = 8 bushels = 64 gallons. The quarter of weight is another unit: 28 lb, or 12.70058636 kg