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metric-shorthand

Something for fun

This whole thing originated from a complaint that I've heard from English speakers about adopting metric units. The complaint goes something like, "In English we like our units to be monosyllabic, e.g. mile, yard, foot, inch, cup, ounce, spoon, pint, quart, pound, and ton. Metric units tend to be polysyllabic to begin with or they become so when they have their prefixes attached, e.g. meter, liter, kilogram, etc. English speaking countries are unlikely to adopt metric units if they are forced to use terms they consider overly long."

Ignoring the point that all other cultures seem to have gotten over this if they ever had this objection at all, and the fact that a number of English units are also polysyllabic (gallon, teaspoon, tablespoon, pica, acre, acre-foot, barrel, foot-pound, horsepower), I created this with the assumption English has a unique problem in the interest of helping the upgrade along. The program creates many monosyllabic terms for common unit combinations. It definitely isn't perfect (this isn't even an alpha release) but it creates some interesting shorthand terms. I've highlighted a few in the comments at the bottom.

Upcoming updates:

  • add newtons and pascals.