US dry measures are 16% larger than liquid measures. In US cooking, dry and liquid measures are the same: the cup, the tablespoon, the teaspoon. Indeed, the bushel, the best-known unit of dry measure because it is the quoted unit in commodity markets, is in fact a unit of mass in those contexts.Ĭonversely, the ton used in specifying tonnage and in freight calculations is often a volume measurement rather than a mass measurement. There are also special measures for specific goods, such as the cord of wood, the sack, the bale of wool or cotton, the box of fruit, etc.īecause it is difficult to measure actual volume and easy to measure mass, many of these units are now also defined as units of mass, specific to each commodity, so a bushel of apples is a different weight from a bushel of wheat (weighed at a specific moisture level). Many of the units are associated with particular goods, so for instance the dry hogshead has been used for sugar and for tobacco, and the peck for apples. They have a different value from both the dry and liquid US versions. Imperial units of volume are the same for both dry and liquid goods. The bushel and the peck are only used for dry goods. In US customary units, most units of volume exist both in a dry and a liquid version, with the same name, but different values: the dry hogshead, dry barrel, dry gallon, dry quart, dry pint, etc. However, the stere is still widely used for firewood. In the original metric system, the unit of dry volume was the stere, equal to a one-meter cube, but this is not part of the modern metric system the liter and the cubic meter are now used. Today, many units nominally of dry measure have become standardized as units of mass (see bushel) and many other units are commonly conflated or confused with units of mass. The larger volumes of the dry measures apparently arose because they were based on heaped rather than "struck" (leveled) containers. The names are often the same as for the units used to measure liquids, despite representing different volumes. They were formerly used for many other foods, such as salt pork and salted fish, and for industrial commodities such as coal, cement, and lime. They were or are typically used in agriculture, agronomy, and commodity markets to measure grain, dried beans, dried and fresh produce, and some seafood. They have largely been replaced by the units used for measuring volumes in the metric system and liquid volumes in the imperial system but are still used for some commodities in the US customary system. Units of volume for non-liquid commoditiesĭry measures are units of volume to measure bulk commodities that are not fluids and that were typically shipped and sold in standardized containers such as barrels.
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