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Nail (unit)

Unit of cloth measurement

Summary

Unit of cloth measurement

A nail, as a unit of cloth measurement, is generally a sixteenth of a yard or 2 inches (5.715 cm). The nail was apparently named after the practice of hammering brass nails into the counter at shops where cloth was sold. On the other hand, R D Connor, in The weights and measures of England (p 84) states that the nail was the 16th part of a Roman foot, i.e., digitus or finger, although he provides no reference to support this. Zupko's A dictionary of weights and measures for the British Isles (p 256) states that the nail was originally the distance from the thumbnail to the joint at the base of the thumb, or alternately, from the end of the middle finger to the second joint.

An archaic usage of the term nail is as a sixteenth of a (long) hundredweight for mass, or 1 clove of 7 pound avoirdupois (3.175 kg).

The nail in literature

Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail

Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter cricket thou:―

Brav'd in mine own house with a skein of

thread!

Explanation: Katherine and Petruchio are purchasing new clothes for Bianca's wedding. Petruchio is concerned that Katharine's dress has too many frills, wonders what it will cost, and suspects that he has been cheated. Katherine says she likes it, and complains that Petruchio is making a fool of her. The tailor repeats Katherine's words: Sir, she says you're making a fool of her. Petruchio then launches into the above-quoted tirade. Monstrous may be a double-entendre for cuckold. The half-yard, quarter and nail were divisions of the yard used in cloth measurement.

The nail in law

II. ...for every Half a Quarter the Three Quarters Yard and Nail plain Cloth shall exceed the said Breadths, shall forfeit the Sum of for Five Shillings Sterling...

Notes

References

  1. Charles Arnold. (1850). "The boy's arithmetic".
  2. William White. (1874). "Notes and queries". Oxford University Press.
  3. Bill Gove. (2006). "Logging railroads of the Adirondacks". Syracuse University Press.
  4. R. D. Connor. (1987). "The weights and measures of England". H.M.S.O..
  5. Ronald Edward Zupko. (1985). "A dictionary of weights and measures for the British Isles: the Middle Ages to the twentieth century". American Philosophical Society.
  6. William Shakespeare. (1778). "The plays of William Shakespeare in ten volumes: with corrections and illustrations of various commentators". Printed for C. Bathurst.
  7. (1998). "Stages of play: Shakespeare's theatrical energies in Elizabethan performance". University of Delaware Press.
  8. (1763). "The statutes at large: from the Magna Charta, to the end of the eleventh Parliament of Great Britain, anno 1761 [continued to 1807]". Printed by J. Bentham.
  9. (1811). "The statutes at large, of England and of Great Britain: from Magna Carta to the union of the kingdoms of Great Britain and Ireland". Printed by G. Eyre and A. Strahan.
Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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