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A dan or shi (Chinese: 石; pinyin: dàn, shí) in China, koku in Japan and seok in Korea, is a unit of volume mainly for grains. It originated in China and later spread to other places in East Asia. [1] One dan is divided into 10 dous or 100 shengs. It is 100 litres in China, [2] [3] 180.39 litres in Japan [4] and 180 litres in Korea. [5]
A measure of distance equal to about 7 ⁄ 8 of a mile (1.4 km), defined as the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque. The Sheppey is the creation of Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, included in The Meaning of Liff, their dictionary of putative meanings for words that are actually just place names. [16]
Classifiers play a similar role to measure words, except that measure words denote a particular quantity of something (a drop, a cupful, a pint, etc.), rather than the inherent countable units associated with a count noun. Classifiers are used with count nouns; measure words can be used with mass nouns (e.g. "two pints of mud"), and can also be ...
As a unit of measurement, the word shi (石) can also be pronounced dan. To avoid confusion, the character is sometimes changed to 擔 (dàn), meaning "burden" or "load". Likewise, in Cantonese the word is pronounced sek (石) or daam (擔), and in Hakka it is pronounced tam (擔). The word picul appeared as early as the mid 9th century in ...
The Chinese equivalent or cognate unit for capacity is the shi or dan ... In metric measures 1 lumber koku is about 278.3 litres (61.2 imp gal; 73.5 US gal).
The Chinese word for metre is 米 mǐ; this can take the Chinese standard SI prefixes (for "kilo-", "centi-", etc.). A kilometre, however, may also be called 公里 gōnglǐ, i.e. a metric lǐ. In the engineering field, traditional units are rounded up to metric units. For example, the Chinese word 絲 (T) or 丝 (S) sī is used to express 0.01 mm.
Metric units are units based on the metre, gram or second and decimal (power of ten) multiples or sub-multiples of these. According to Schadow and McDonald, [1] metric units, in general, are those units "defined 'in the spirit' of the metric system, that emerged in late 18th century France and was rapidly adopted by scientists and engineers.
In Chinese, a numeral cannot usually quantify a noun by itself; instead, the language relies on classifiers, commonly also referred to as measure words. [note 2] When a noun is preceded by a number, a demonstrative such as this or that, or certain quantifiers such as every, a classifier must normally be inserted before the noun. [1]