The United States is one of the few countries left which hasn’t gone over to the metric system. Most countries have been metric for decades and presumably most people grew up under the metric system.
But these countries all had a pre-metric system and are often exposed to American culture. So how familiar is the average non-American with the old style measurements? Not just in the sense of recognizing the names but in knowing what approximately what size they are?
The concept of dry ingredients by volume, and in particular “cups” and “fluid ounces”, is almost total gobbledigook to European amateur cooks.
As a general rule we use weight in grammes and occasionally kilos for dry ingredients, and volume in millilitres or litres for wet. The exception to this is spoon-sized measures, but we have metric categorizations for them too: 1 tsp = 5ml, 1 tbsp = 15ml (though googling that I find those values are very imprecise: it’s actually 5.9 and 17.8 respectively).
Because I love baking I treated myself to US cup measures so I could use American recipes, but I’d say I’m pretty unusual. And “sticks” of butter? We don’t have them and I have to refer to the internet to find out what they are.
The anathema of such measurements is problematic the other way: in another thread I’m asking about US cooking terms for the translation of a European baking book into US English. In their wisdom the publishers have decided not to convert the measurements into cup measures but into oz and lbs and other weight measures, thus (IMO) guaranteeing its failure in a place where many people don’t even have kitchen scales.
UK - very familiar with feet and inches when it comes to height, but puzzled as to why you guys don’t use stones for bodyweight 
We use weight in grammes? I thought we still used pounds and ounces most of the time in the UK. Things will have metric measurements listed, but they’re not usually used.
The push to weigh people by kg definitely has not caught on; hospitals will write the weight down in kgs, but their patients don’t have a clue what they’re talking about.
I heard it a lot on the labour ward, for example, with the babies kept there with their mums for an extra day or two for medical reasons; ‘oh, your baby’s so-and-so grammes today!’ Parents smile and nod blankly.
Similarly at the passport office when I had to get an emergency passport about 8 years ago. Previously there was an option to put height in feet and inches, and then it went all metric. Nobody knew their metric height.
The rest of it’s true, though. I find ‘cups’ a bit baffling, TBH. I remember a discussion on here once where some Americans were equally baffled by us using actual weights. Que sera and all that. But I don’t think they’re included in Imperial measurements, are they?
This doesn’t match my experience where it comes to consumables: beer, flour, oil, fizzy drinks, wine, petrol - everything is sold in metric. I can buy half a kilo of flour or a 500ml can of beer, and would put 50L of petrol in my tank.
Nor does it match my experience when it comes to cooking: almost all recipes are in metric.
Stone for personal weight, feet and inches for personal height, and miles and mph I give you, but apart from that everything else in my life in the UK has been metric for years and years. And to everyone else I know too.
Sometimes it gets a bit odd: mileage in my car is measured in miles-per-litre (though mpg would be understood) which is a bit confusing.
Canadian: Length from inches to feet to yards to miles (not sure how many yards in a mile).
Weight: Grains to ounces (28-some grams) to pound to ton (although I never know if it’s a short ton or a long ton)
Volume: 3.8 some liters. Fluid ounces are 28-some milliliters. Intermediary units have not stuck in my head.
British but live elsewhere in Europe and therefore completely comfortable in both Imperial and Metric measurements. What I default to is a bit all over the place (and depends on who I am speaking to). For example, long distances I use miles but short ones I am more likely to go with centimetres. Weight I prefer stones, but am using kilos more and more due to where I live.
For those that don’t know, British cars have both kph and mph on their speedometers. When I was growing up in the 80s the weather report had both Celsius and Fahrenheit, with Fahrenheit being the one mentioned first. These days it is only Celsius (I think). Actually, that’s another oddity I have noticed in the UK: temperature. To express cold we use Celsius so we can base things around zero. To express warmth it is still quite common to use Fahrenheit so as to mention proximity to 100.
What we (UK) call the Imperial system (ie inches, pounds etc) would be totally alien to mainland Europeans, who never did use what you’re calling ‘old style measurements’. Even before metric was widely adopted in the 19th Century, other countries outside the British Empire didn’t use Imperial – they all had different systems. So an inch or a pound would mean nothing to them.
As others have pointed out, the UK is a mixed bag. Officially we use metric, but there are a few instances where the old system persists - road distance in miles, human height and weight in feet, inches, stones and pounds - in casual usage anyway, medical people would measure us in metric. But in smaller measurements we are entirely metric, so recipes use grams, we measure things in centimetres and millimetres, for example. I imagine most British people know what an inch looks like, or a pound of sugar, or a pint of beer (we still have pint glasses in pubs, the european union let us keep those as it’s deemed to be part of our national culture), but that’s about it.
But I have NO idea what a ‘cup’ is supposed to be, and find US cooking recipes unfathomable as a result.
I’m Dutch and have to use google to find out what a cup, foot, inch, yard, stone or mile would be in metric…
In Finland the most common item in imperial units is timber, it comes in two-by-fours and one-by-fours. I have no idea why.
I’m very familiar with foot and inch conversions because of customers who have prefered those. If I don’t have a measure, I might use my foot to approximate feet or thumb to approximate inches, but if I do, no, I never use them.
And then I know what a pint should look like.
Australian here:
Weight measures are pretty much metric through and through. I have no clue what my weight is in pounds.
Length seems to have hung on longer - you can still find clothes measured in inches, and most people probably know their height in both measures.
Use cups/tablespoons/teaspoons quite a lot in cooking, but they’re metric cups/tablespoons/teaspoons which probably means I’m subtly fucking up every American recipe I ever tried…
Spanish:
Robos and robadas are local agrimensure units; we use them in Navarra and Aragon but not elsewhere; their name is linked to arroba, an old weight unit for grain which was falling out of favor but which happens to share a name with the symbol @. Libras (pounds) are used as a unit of weight in Barcelona, but they come to mean “closer to 400g than half a kilo would be”, they’re used as an approximate measurement rather than as an actual unit. Handspans and square handspans are also used; the standard handspan is 20cm, the standard square handspan 400cm[sup]2[/sup] and these are used as an actual unit - there are some areas where the price of flats is so high that the unit used for comparison is “price per square handspan” rather than “price per square meter”.
We had units whose names get translated to/from English, such as miles or the aforementioned pounds, but they’ve got different values than yours. In fact, the milla castellana and the milla aragonesa were different and there was a wide variety of libras.
Dude, beer in pubs. How could you forget that?!?
I’m Australian but I’m old enough to remember using Imperial measurements and having the learn the avoirdupois stuff which was on the back of all exercise books. Most of my younger colleagues haven’t a clue about rods, roods or perches. Chains and bushels leave them cold but most know about pounds, inches, miles etc.
Too many pints.
I find it annoying when I’m given an option between “Metric” and “US” measurements. Usually in two of the most common daily measurement activities: distance and weight.
Neither, thanks. I don’t know why miles and pounds have been co-opted to be called “US measurements” (well, I do know, but I don’t agree with the premise or the attitude it implies) and I don’t use kilometres when I travel or grams when I weigh myself.
I travel miles at a speed of miles per hour, and I weigh a number of pounds. And I’m not American.
Although Canada has been metric for, IIRC, 38 years and all distances, weights, temperatures are given only in metric, people are still weighed only in pounds. And when I report my temperature to my doctor, it is in F. Although when I was in the hospital, they measured it in C.
But measures of wood and other building materials are still in British units. I am curious about one thing. The standard plywood sheet is 4’ x 8’. What is it in Europe?
Oh, and I have been in Europe and seen fruit sold by the pound (Pfund in Switzerland, livre in France) but by a pound they meant 500 g, not 454. Here, meat and such often has its price given by both the pound and the kilo. But the pound used is clearly 454 g. Since this has been going on for decades, it is hard to see it changing.
You’re probably right about it not being a great idea, but man-oh-man, I like it! I wish more publishers would use weights instead of volume measurements, especially for baking.
And for what it’s worth, it may not be a complete failure if it’s a baking book. I have at least a couple baking recipe books that use weights instead of volume, so the practice is making some inroads there. Can you talk them into putting a conversion table somewhere in the book? That might go a long way.
Publishing-wise, I think the best of both worlds is to have both weights and volume measurements, in the hopes of education the public so sometime in the future we can dump the standard volume measurements altogether.
German here. We’ve been using the the metric system since 1870, and the only non-metric units I can think of which are sometimes used are inches, but only in technical contexts like display sizes or form factors of computer components. As an engineer, I’ve known for a long time that 1 inch = 25.4 mm, but most Germans without any technical background wouldn’t have a clue.
And like noted above, we sometimes buy our groceries by the pound, but that just means 1/2 kg = 500g, and thus is a quasi-metric unit whose name for an old non-metric unit has survived.
I was wondering things like if you read about a person being “six feet tall and weighing two hundred pounds” would you be wondering if this person was tall and skinny or short and fat? Or if you read about somebody being outside in twenty degree weather, would you picture them wearing a parka or a pair of shorts? Or I saw a joke on a sitcom this week about somebody being a thirteen pound baby and another one on a webcomic about somebody having a five inch penis and I was wondering if non-Americans would really get the punchlines.