List of humorous units of measurement

Based on Wikipedia: List of humorous units of measurement

The Delightful Absurdity of Measuring Everything Wrong

Somewhere in Cambridge, Massachusetts, police officers measure accident locations on the Harvard Bridge in "smoots" – a unit exactly five feet and seven inches long, named after a fraternity pledge who was used as a human ruler in 1958. Meanwhile, marine biologists are measuring coral reefs in "wiffles," nuclear physicists are calculating collision probabilities in "barns" and "outhouses," and NASA has an official scale for space sickness that maxes out at one "Garn" – the point of complete incapacitation.

Welcome to the wonderfully ridiculous world of humorous units of measurement, where scientists, engineers, writers, and pranksters have spent decades inventing alternatives to the sensible metric system.

These aren't just jokes. Many of these units have found their way into actual use, embedded in software, adopted by professionals, and even built into physical infrastructure. They reveal something charming about human nature: even in the most precise and technical fields, we can't resist a good laugh.

The Smoot: When a Person Becomes a Ruler

In October 1958, Oliver Reed Smoot was a pledge at MIT's Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity. His brothers had a task for him: measure the Harvard Bridge using his own body as the unit. Smoot would lie down, his fraternity brothers would mark his position, and then he'd get up and lie down again. Over and over, 364 times, plus or minus one ear.

The bridge, it turned out, was 364.4 smoots long.

What makes this story remarkable isn't the prank itself – college students have done sillier things. It's what happened afterward. The smoot markings, painted on the bridge's sidewalk, became beloved local landmarks. When the city repainted the bridge, they preserved the smoot markers. When the bridge was rebuilt in the 1980s, the Massachusetts Highway Department cast the new concrete sidewalk in smoot-length segments rather than the standard six-foot sections.

The Cambridge Police Department officially adopted smoots for measuring accident locations on the bridge. Google Calculator recognizes the smoot as a valid unit. Google Earth includes it in its measurement tools.

And Oliver Smoot? He went on to become the chairman of the American National Standards Institute and then president of the International Organization for Standardization – the person literally responsible for international measurement standards started his career as one.

Measuring the Immeasurable: Barns, Sheds, and Outhouses

Nuclear physicists needed a way to describe how likely particles are to collide with each other. The technical term is "cross-section" – imagine the target area that one particle presents to another. For atomic nuclei, these areas are impossibly small, measured in fractions of square meters that require scientific notation with double-digit negative exponents.

During the Manhattan Project, physicists grew tired of saying things like "ten to the minus twenty-eighth square meters." Someone – likely inspired by the expression "couldn't hit the broad side of a barn" – suggested calling this area a "barn." The joke was that on the atomic scale, this was actually a pretty big target.

One barn equals 10⁻²⁸ square meters, roughly the cross-sectional area of a uranium nucleus.

The name stuck. It became an official unit, used in serious physics papers and textbooks. And because physicists have a sense of humor that compounds, they invented smaller related units. An "outhouse" is one millionth of a barn. A "shed" is 10⁻²⁴ barns – a barn divided by a trillion trillion.

These names appear in peer-reviewed scientific literature.

The Potrzebie System: Mad Magazine's Gift to Metrology

In 1957, a nineteen-year-old named Donald Knuth submitted an article to Mad Magazine outlining an entirely new system of measurement. The fundamental unit was the potrzebie (pot-ZHEB-ee, a Polish word that appeared frequently in the magazine as a nonsense term), defined as exactly the thickness of Mad issue number 26: 2.2633484517438173216473 millimeters.

From this absurdly precise foundation, Knuth built an entire measurement system. Volume was measured in ngogn – one thousand cubic potrzebies. Mass was measured in blintz, defined as the mass of one ngogn of halva, which Knuth helpfully noted was "a form of pie with a specific gravity of 3.1416" – that's pi, for those keeping track.

Time was measured in clarkes (after science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke), with a clarke being one average Earth rotation. The system included units for power (whatmeworry), heat energy (vreeble), and work (hoo and hah).

Knuth didn't stop at units. He created an entire calendar system based on Mad's founding date of October 1, 1952. Dates before this were labeled "B.M." – Before Mad. The ten months of his calendar spelled out "Tales Calculated To Drive You Humor In A Jugular Vein," a reference to the magazine's original subtitle.

The nineteen-year-old who invented this elaborate joke went on to become one of the most influential computer scientists in history. Donald Knuth wrote "The Art of Computer Programming," invented the TeX typesetting system, and received the Turing Award. His potrzebie system remains a beloved footnote in both Mad Magazine history and the history of measurement.

Time Measured in New York Seconds and Scaramuccis

Terry Pratchett, in his novel "Lords and Ladies," defined the New York second as "the shortest unit of time in the multiverse" – specifically, the time between a traffic light turning green and the taxi behind you honking its horn.

This captures something profound about how we actually experience time. Clock time is objective and universal, but lived time varies wildly. An hour waiting in line feels different from an hour with a good book. Pratchett's New York second acknowledges this subjective dimension while making us laugh.

The "ohnosecond" works similarly. Coined in Elizabeth Powell Crowe's 1993 novel "The Electronic Traveler," it's the moment immediately after you make a terrible mistake – sending an email to the wrong person, deleting an important file, posting something you shouldn't have. That frozen instant where you can do nothing but say "oh no." We all know exactly how long an ohnosecond feels, even though it can't be measured on any clock.

More recently, political humor gave us the Scaramucci, or "Mooch" – a period of ten to eleven days, named after Anthony Scaramucci's brief tenure as White House Communications Director in 2017. The unit caught on because it provided a useful way to describe political instability. "This crisis has lasted three Scaramuccis" carries more rhetorical punch than "this crisis has lasted thirty-three days."

John von Neumann, the legendary mathematician, preferred more scholarly humor. He defined a microcentury – one millionth of a century, or about 52 minutes and 36 seconds – as the maximum appropriate length for a lecture. The precision is unnecessary (what's an extra 36 seconds among mathematicians?) but adds to the joke. Von Neumann was known for his precision in everything, even his humor.

IBM, with characteristic corporate literalism, coined the nanocentury in 1969 based on their design philosophy that users should "never wait more than a few nanocenturies for a response." One nanocentury is approximately 3.156 seconds. Programmer Tom Duff later noted that, to within half a percent, a nanocentury equals pi seconds – an elegant coincidence that would have delighted von Neumann.

Distances Large and Impossibly Small

The light-year – the distance light travels in one year – is among the most evocative units in science. It makes cosmic distances comprehensible by tying them to time, even if the actual number (about 9.5 trillion kilometers) remains beyond human intuition.

The beard-second applies the same logic to the microscopic. It's the distance an average beard grows in one second – about 5 to 10 nanometers, depending on who you ask. This turns out to be a convenient scale for discussing integrated circuits and other nanotechnology. Google Calculator accepts "beard-second" as a valid unit.

At the other end of the spectrum, combining an atto- prefix (10⁻¹⁸) with a parsec (3.26 light-years) produces the attoparsec: approximately 3.086 centimeters, or about an inch and a quarter. This is the cosmic equivalent of measuring an elephant in micrometers – technically correct, absurdly inappropriate, and therefore hilarious to a certain kind of scientist.

Douglas Adams and John Lloyd, in their 1983 book "The Meaning of Liff," contributed the sheppey: the closest distance at which sheep remain picturesque, approximately seven-eighths of a mile. The book's conceit was to take place names that aren't used as words and give them definitions for concepts that need names. The sheppey is named after the Isle of Sheppey in England, and the unit captures something genuinely useful – that distance where pastoral charm gives way to the messy reality of actual livestock.

Australian English, characteristically blunt, offers the bee's dick: a very small distance, as in "he missed the truck by a bee's dick." The unit derives from the small size of a male bee's reproductive organ and requires no further explanation.

Mixing Scales for Maximum Absurdity

Some of the best humorous units come from combining incompatible scales. A barn-megaparsec sounds like nonsense – the barn measures atomic cross-sections, the megaparsec measures distances between galaxies. Multiply them together and you get... about two-thirds of a teaspoon.

This is mathematically legitimate. Area times length equals volume. The fact that the area is subatomic and the length is intergalactic is irrelevant to the calculation. But the cognitive dissonance – measuring kitchen quantities using nuclear physics and cosmology – is the entire point.

The Hubble-barn takes this further. The Hubble length is the radius of the observable universe, derived from the Hubble constant and the speed of light. Multiply it by a barn, and you get about 13.1 liters – roughly three and a half gallons. The entire visible universe, at nuclear cross-section width, fits in a large bucket.

These units serve no practical purpose except to demonstrate that mathematics doesn't care about human intuitions of scale. You can meaningfully multiply any unit of area by any unit of length and get a valid unit of volume. The universe is indifferent to whether this feels sensible.

Measuring Human Qualities

Not everything can be measured in meters, kilograms, and seconds. Some things resist quantification entirely. This hasn't stopped people from trying, usually for comedic effect.

The helen is a unit of beauty, derived from Helen of Troy, whose face "launched a thousand ships" according to Homer. One millihelen is therefore the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship. The negative helen measures the ability to beach ships – ugliness so profound it repels vessels from shore.

The Garn measures space sickness. NASA's official scale for space adaptation syndrome – the nausea and disorientation that affects many astronauts – maxes out at one Garn, named after Senator Jake Garn, who became severely ill during his 1985 Space Shuttle flight. At one Garn, the sufferer is completely incapacitated. The term is used informally by astronauts and flight surgeons.

The dirac, named after physicist Paul Dirac, measures taciturnity: one word per hour. Dirac was famous for his precise, economical speech. His colleagues at Cambridge found this both admirable and slightly unnerving, leading to the joke unit. In an era of information overload, measuring speech in diracs seems increasingly relevant.

The blatt measures body odor, named after programmer Richard Greenblatt, who reportedly prioritized coding over bathing during the early days of MIT's artificial intelligence laboratory. According to Steven Levy's book "Hackers," Greenblatt's colleagues developed the unit, though they typically used the milliblatt – the full blatt being "just about inconceivable."

The Canard and the Lenat: Measuring Nonsense

Andy Lewis created the canard to measure quackery in pseudoscientific health claims. The scale runs from zero (no quackery) to ten (complete quackery), based on the presence of telltale words like "energy," "holistic," "vibrations," "magnetic healing," and "quantum" – terms borrowed from physics to lend false credibility to dubious treatments.

The Lenat measures bogosity – how bogus something is. It's named after Douglas Lenat, a computer scientist who allegedly failed a student for answering "AI is bogus" on every exam question. The full Lenat is considered too large for normal use; the microLenat serves for everyday purposes.

The Lovelace (named, presumably, after Ada Lovelace, though the connection is unclear) measures how badly software "sucks" from a system administrator's perspective. The profession's founding assumption, according to tradition, is that "software that does not suck does not exist." One Lovelace is a large quantity; most software rates in milliLovelaces.

These units share a common structure: they take something subjective and unmeasurable, attach a scale and a name, and thereby make it discussable. The humor comes from the pretense of precision applied to inherently imprecise phenomena. But there's also something useful here. Saying "this treatment is about six canards" communicates something that "this treatment seems somewhat dubious" doesn't quite capture.

The Furlong-Firkin-Fortnight System

While most of the world has adopted the International System of Units (the metric system), a small tradition of measuring things in furlongs, firkins, and fortnights persists as a form of protest against sensible standardization.

The furlong is an eighth of a mile, originally the length of a furrow in a plowed field. The firkin is an old measure of volume, typically for beer or butter. The fortnight is fourteen days. None of these units are in common use for their original purposes, which is precisely the point.

Expressing the speed of light as 1.8 terafurlongs per fortnight is technically correct. It's also deeply impractical, which is the joke. But there's a pedagogical value: converting between unit systems teaches dimensional analysis, one of the most powerful tools in scientific reasoning. Furlongs per fortnight make excellent homework problems because students can't solve them by rote memorization.

One furlong per fortnight, incidentally, is very nearly one centimeter per minute – accurate to within one part in four hundred. The universe, it seems, has its own sense of humor about unit conversions.

Why Do Scientists Make These Jokes?

The barn wasn't invented by comedians. It was invented by physicists working on the Manhattan Project, one of the most serious undertakings in human history. The smoot came from MIT students, but it was adopted by police departments and bridge engineers. NASA officially uses the Garn.

These units reveal something about how technical communities function. The work is often abstract, precise, and removed from everyday experience. Humor provides relief and builds camaraderie. Shared jokes become shibboleths – ways of identifying who belongs to the community and who doesn't.

But there's something deeper. Measurement itself is a human imposition on reality. The meter was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole – a choice as arbitrary, in its way, as using a fraternity pledge's height. The kilogram was, until 2019, defined by a specific platinum-iridium cylinder stored in a vault near Paris.

Humorous units remind us that all measurement is convention. The smoot is arbitrary, but so is the meter. The advantage of the meter is that everyone has agreed to use it, not that it captures some Platonic truth about length. By inventing absurd alternatives, scientists acknowledge the constructed nature of their tools while still taking the work seriously.

Wiffles, Mickeys, and Pirate-Ninjas

Some humorous units arise from practical need. Marine biologists needed cheap, pressure-resistant objects to include in underwater photographs for scale reference. Laser pointers work but are expensive and often miss thin coral branches. Wiffle balls – the perforated plastic toys – cost almost nothing, survive water pressure, and provide a consistent 89-millimeter reference in any orientation.

The wiffle (or WAM, for Wiffle-Assisted Measurement) emerged organically from research practice. Scientists on the vessel EV Nautilus started using the term, and it spread. It's not quite serious – no one publishes papers in wiffles – but it's not quite a joke either. It's a tool for communication that happens to be amusing.

The mickey, measuring mouse movement, occupies similar territory. It's the smallest distance a computer mouse can resolve, named after Mickey Mouse. Mouse sensitivity is specified in mickeys per inch. This started as a programmer's joke but became standard terminology in input device documentation.

The pirate-ninja is more deliberately humorous. Defined as one kilowatt-hour per Martian day (or sol), it appeared in Andy Weir's novel "The Martian" as the unit Mark Watney uses to track his power budget. Weir later learned that the Curiosity rover team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory actually uses "watt-hours per sol" in their meetings – and after reading his book, they joked that they should call them milli-pirate-ninjas.

The donkeypower – 250 watts, about a third of a horsepower – is pure whimsy. So is the sagan, defined as "a large quantity, at least four billion" of anything, honoring Carl Sagan's association with the phrase "billions and billions." These serve no purpose except to make people smile, which is purpose enough.

The Beer Index and Other Regional Delights

Television station WKBW in Buffalo, New York developed the Jimmy Griffin Snow Index to measure winter storm severity. It's named after a former mayor who, during a 1985 storm warning, suggested residents "grab a six-pack" of Genesee beer and wait it out. The index measures expected snowfall in cans of beer – roughly one can per four inches of snow.

This is local humor made practical. Buffalo gets a lot of snow. Residents have developed a culture around dealing with it. The Jimmy Griffin Index captures that culture while providing genuinely useful information. A six-pack storm means two feet of snow; plan accordingly.

The Muggeseggele (MOO-geh-SEG-eh-leh) is an Alemannic German term used in Swabia to indicate a very small amount. It translates, roughly, as "housefly scrotum." Unlike the American "bee's dick," it's not slang – it's a recognized regional idiom, used in polite company, that happens to refer to insect genitalia. Language is strange.

The Hawking Index and Abandoned Books

Mathematician Jordan Ellenberg invented the Hawking Index to measure how many people finish a book they've started. It's named after Stephen Hawking, whose "A Brief History of Time" scores 6.6% – meaning fewer than seven percent of people who start it reach the end.

The methodology involves analyzing popular highlights on Amazon Kindle. If the most-highlighted passages all come from the first few chapters, the book probably isn't being finished. If they're distributed throughout, readers are completing it.

This is humorous measurement with genuine analytical value. It quantifies something we've always suspected – that many bestsellers go unread past the first chapter – while gently teasing both authors and readers. The name honors Hawking by acknowledging that brilliant writing doesn't guarantee engaged reading.

Fictional Measurement Systems

The Zork series of text adventure games, developed by Infocom in the early 1980s, invented an entire system of measurement for its Great Underground Empire. Distance is measured in bloits – defined, in a parody of measurement legends, as "the distance the king's favorite pet can run in one hour." Liquid volume is measured in gloops. Temperature is measured in degrees Q, with water freezing at 57°Q.

These fictional units serve worldbuilding purposes. They make the Great Underground Empire feel like a real place with its own history and conventions. Players encounter bloits and gloops and gradually learn to think in these terms, deepening their immersion in the game's fiction.

The jiffy, while sometimes treated as humorous, is a real unit used in computing. It's the interval between system timer interrupts – the basic heartbeat of a computer's timekeeping. The exact duration varies between systems, typically ranging from one to ten milliseconds. The informal origin of the term (meaning "a very short time") became technical terminology.

What Humorous Units Teach Us

A measurement system is a set of agreements. We agree that the meter is a certain length, that the second is a certain duration, that the kilogram is a certain mass. These agreements enable science, engineering, commerce, and communication across cultures and centuries.

Humorous units work by playing with these agreements. They follow the rules of dimensional analysis while violating the social conventions of what should be measured and how. A beard-second is mathematically coherent but culturally absurd. A Garn is scientifically meaningful but deliberately undignified.

This play has value. It reminds us that measurement is a human activity, not a natural law. It builds community among people who share the joke. It teaches dimensional reasoning to students who might otherwise find unit conversion tedious. And it makes the practice of science and engineering a little more human, a little more fun.

The next time someone tells you that something is three smoots away or rates seven canards on the quackery scale, you're witnessing a tradition that stretches back to Manhattan Project physicists and MIT pranksters, to Mad Magazine editors and Cambridge mathematicians, to marine biologists with Wiffle balls and Buffalo weathercasters with six-packs.

Measurement doesn't have to be serious to be meaningful. Sometimes the best way to understand our systems of knowledge is to laugh at them – precisely, quantifiably, in units of our own devising.