Weird Units Converter
A fun and educational tool to convert between unconventional and historical units of measurement, like furlongs per fortnight.
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A Journey Through Weird & Wonderful Units of Measurement
The Weird Units Converter is a fun and educational tool that lets you explore and convert between a variety of historical, obscure, and whimsical units of measurement. It’s a tribute to the creative and sometimes baffling ways humans have measured the world around them throughout history.
What Makes a Unit "Weird"?
This calculator includes units that are no longer in common use, are specific to a particular niche, or were created for literary or humorous purposes. They provide a fascinating glimpse into different cultures and eras.
A Selection of Our Favorite Weird Units:
- Furlong per Fortnight: A humorous unit of velocity. A furlong is 1/8th of a mile, and a fortnight is 14 days. It translates to a very slow speed, roughly 1 centimeter per minute.
- Donkeypower: An amusing take on "horsepower," often defined as about one-third of a horsepower (approximately 250 watts).
- Smoot: A unit of length created at MIT, defined as the height of a student named Oliver R. Smoot in 1958 (5 feet 7 inches). The Harvard Bridge in Boston is famously measured in Smoots.
- Attoparsec: A unit used by computer scientists. It's about 3.1 centimeters, representing the distance light travels in one nanosecond. The name is a humorous portmanteau of "atto-" (a very small prefix) and "parsec" (a very large astronomical unit).
- Barn: A unit of area used in nuclear physics to quantify the cross-sectional area of a target for particle collisions. One barn is 10⁻²⁸ square meters. It was named "barn" because it was considered a "big" target for particles.
How the Calculator Works
Our calculator works by first converting the value of any weird unit into a standard SI base unit (like meters, seconds, or watts). Once the value is in a standard format, it can be accurately converted to any other unit, whether weird or conventional.
Practical Example: The Speed of a Tortoise
A common garden tortoise moves at a speed of about 0.17 mph. Let's see what that is in furlongs per fortnight.
- Enter "0.17" into the "Miles per hour (mph)" field.
- The calculator converts this to its base unit (meters per second).
- It then converts the base unit value into all other units, including the weird ones.
- The result for "Furlongs per Fortnight" would be approximately 228.
So, you can say a tortoise ambles along at a respectable 228 furlongs per fortnight!
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