1 quintal: how many grams, kilograms, tons?

A quintal is an obsolete unit used for measuring weight, especially popular with merchants and farmers. It has been banned from use in the United Kingdom in 1985, when Weights and Measures Act was signed.

Nevertheless, since quintal had been in use until relatively recently, some people may still be using it customarily. So, it’s good to know how much a quintal weighs.

Other names for quintal are hundredweight, centum weight or cental. The root ‘cent-’ stems from Latin and refers to a hundred. And that’s exactly the original meaning of the quintal: 100 base units of weight (usually kilogrammes or other common units depending on a country). Typically, a quintal means 100 kg or 100,000 g or 0.1 t (ton).

In case of English-speaking countries, there are different values and names of a quintal, depending on whether we choose kilogrammes or pounds as a basic unit:

	Pounds	Kilograms
UK	Imperial hundredweight: 112 lb	Cental: 100 kg = 100 000 g = 0.1 t
USA	Long hundredweight: 112 lb	Short hundredweight: 100 kg

Did you know?

The names ‘quintal’ and ‘cental’, although very different at the first sight, share a common root:

Classical Latin: centenarius ---> Late Latin: centenarium pondus ---> Greek: kentenarion ---> Arabic: qintar ---> Medieval Latin: quintale ---> Old French: quintal ---> English: quintal.

The original Latin term was adopted into Arabic via Greek. From there, it was carried back to Europe by medieval Arabic merchants.

Have you ever heard of a hundredweight being used nowadays?