Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 115, the measure of a person.

In this episode, we're going to look at the way we measure things, and the words we use

for measurements.

This is really an extension of the last episode, where we explored the history of numbers.

People used numbers in lots of different ways, and one of the main uses was to measure

things.

But for much of human history, measurements varied greatly from region to region, and even

within the same region, measurements were often inconsistent.

But around the current point in our overall story of English in the early 1300s, all of

that started to change.

On this time, many of our common measurements were standardized, which allowed for more

precision and accuracy.

This time we'll explore those developments, and we'll see how the evolution of measurements

contributed to the English language.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is History of

EnglishPodcast.com, and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes

and transcripts at patreon.com slash history of English.

Now last time, we looked at the history of numbers, and the words we used for numbers.

And we saw that the modern Hindu Arabic numerals were just beginning to appear in England

in the early 1300s.

But it took a long time for Europeans to appreciate the mathematical benefits of those new numbers.

...