Quintals
by coffeeman on 03/09/04 at 13:29:00

Are quintals only metric?  The ones you have are equivalent to 100 kilograms.  When I was in Guatemala I was under the impression that 1 quintal was equal to 100 pounds.

Re: Quintals
by Robert Fogt on 03/10/04 at 03:51:14

The unit quintal began life as money, equal to 100 Roman pounds. The Latin word was centenarius, meaning "comprised of 100".

In France the unit was equal to 100 livres, which is about 108 pounds. The unit later became the English hundredweight, which is 100 pounds. The Spanish quintal is 100 libras, about 101 pounds. The Portugese quintal is 128 libras, about 130 pounds.

But all that began 2000 years ago. The traditional terms above are, according to my research, obsolete. Meaning you may still find old documents using them, but all new uses are the metric quintal, equal to 100 kilograms.

I have not been able to determine when the switch to the metric quintal began, so it could be fairly recent. If that is the case than there very well could still be countries using the traditional meanings. Afterall there are still people in the U.S. measuring things in Rods and Hogsheads, which are both obsolete traditional terms.

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