Or yard. Or carpeting. Or door. Measurements are something you’ll find in just about every category we’ve got. Whether it’s the length of kiln dried lumber or the vital stats of a collectible concert poster, it’s really helpful to have an idea of the size of something for sale.
You know we’re all about efficiency, so it’ll be no surprise to you that we punctuate measurements wherever possible: you’ll see us use an apostrophe (‘) to indicate feet and quotation marks to indicate inches (“). In other words, something that’s 8 feet and 4 inches long, for example, is most efficiently expressed like this: 8’4”.
Ever wonder why we refer to that twelve inches as a foot? You’ve got the Romans to thank (though it’s estimated that the Roman foot was a little small than the one we know, checking in at 11.65 inches). By the 5th century, the foot was revamped, resulting in a Anglo-Saxon interpretation of the foot (13.2 inches) used for land measurement while the Roman-derived foot was used in construction. Just around 1300, though, the measurements were standardized by English law to the foot we know today. Interestingly, the United States is the only industrialized nation to still use the foot as a unit of measurement; set foot most anywhere else and you’d be using the metric system.