It is also measured in inches in Europe and it is weird. Electronics get sold globally and I guess nobody wants to discuss a "139.7 cm TV".
It's a magic number though and I cannot imagine the sizes. I just know that 55 is bigger than 49. It is the same with phones, where it is much less important as screen ratios "get improved" every year and the diagonal means basically not much.
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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Additionally, at least in German, the term inch is usually translated into the local counterpart Zoll.
Same in France, where it is translated to "pouces"
And we tried changing this a few years back, but failed, since the numbers were too wacky.
I wouldn't call it "measured in inches" as much as they are "named" with a partly numerical name, which may or may not be an adequate correspondence with a different country's length scale.
It's similar with bicycles: many tires are named in inches. Two tires with the same number of "inches" may however not have the same diameter, so to translate size-names into measurements is fraught with pitfalls.
It's a bit like how in NZ you can order a "pint" of beer, and the bartender will fill up a random size glass around 400~700ml 😅: you can buy a 30" TV, and if you measure the diagonal, it's around 79-82cm 😅
It's usually marked in both inches and centimetres, but most people are more familiar with the inch-based size. I don't know why. Perhaps it's because the USA is/was so dominant in the computer and mobile phone industry. It's the same with car tyres, for some reason their size is given in inches as well.
When traveling in Japan, I do recall seeing TVs marked in inches. But in a world where globalization has made goods ever more accessible and affordable, this shouldn't be too surprising.
Another example of ostensibly American or British Imperial units, lots of plumbing around the world is sized in inches or fractions of inches. But even in the USA, there might not be any dimension which actually measures the same as the trade designation. For example, 1/2-inch Schedule 40 PVC pipe has an inner and outer diameter that is larger than 0.5 inch (12.7 mm). In the UK, I understand that they might round off these trade designations to centimeters, but I have no idea if that would then reflect their true outside diameter or if it's just a straight conversion of the trade destination.
Aviation also uses feet for altitude in most of the world, with even ardently metric countries like Russia changing in 2017-2020 from meters to feet. In all these cases, it's ultimately a matter of harmonization to reduce confusion and increase compatibility, either technically, procedurally, or economically.
TV's and plumbing are still measured in inches in the UK, the measuring system was already in place when we went metric and it was what people were used to. Plumbing fittings are as you said now rounded off to millimetres etc. but the actual physical size is still the same as the original imperial. For example what is referred to as a 25mm fitting is actually one inch (25.4 mm).
The airlines measuring things in feet gets under my skin so hard. >:(
It gets even more interesting when aviation uses:
- feet for vertical distances -- such as 1000 ft overhead separation for aircraft heading towards each other
- meters for horizontal distances, such as 1.3 km between two aircraft going for landings on separate, parallel runways of the same airport
- statute miles for visibility ahead of the aircraft, such as when fog is ahead
- nautical miles for distances to waypoints and navigational aids
The bizarre thing is that these are all conventions that stemmed from good rationale, at least initially. Using meters for horizontal distances means it's hard to confuse it with vertical distance, when speaking over rough radio comms. Statute miles is what the meteorological agency in the USA would report, and ATC provides that information to pilots. And nautical miles, as the name suggests, has a rich seafaring tradition, which aviation adopted wholesale.
It's why aircraft have the red (left) and green (right) navigational lights, same as ships do. It's also why the "rule of the road" for two intersecting aircraft is for the right-hand aircraft to go first, since their pilot sees the other's green light, while showing a red light to the halting aircraft.
TL;DR: everything boils down to: "it's how we've always done it"
Tho relationship of nautical miles and knots for speed is really good for navigating over a sphere. There are some handy shortcuts that make quick mental calculations fast and intuitive, specially with an e6b flight computer (not an electronic).
The alternative would've been to use euclidean planes, projections and radian transformations, which would've been harder to use for navigating.
meters for horizontal distances, such as
not really. distance is measured in (nautical) miles, speed in knots (1 knot is 1 nautical mile per hour)
It actually works pretty well by chance more than anything else. 1000 ft is a really good altitude separation between aircraft. 500 is a good offset for irregular traffic too. Multiples of 150/300 m are more annoying to work with and 500/1000 m would waste an excessively large amount of airspace.
why though?
South America here. It's one of the few things where we use freedom units. And beer pints as some other pointed out.
Yeah, it is inches too in Southeast Asia. I guess simply converting current size screen to centimeter just makes the number awkward. For example 14 inches is 35.56 cm. If display to be measured in centimeters, I think the sizes will have to be different to make it marketable.
It's not a whole number in inches either, usually an approximation. My 32" monitor can be 31¾".
Most screens do mention the cm value somewhere on the box, using inches is just normalized.