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Length/Distance | Convert from story to gry |
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Common Length Conversions Metric Length Conversions Unit Definition (story) The story is an informal unit of distance equal to the average distance between floors of a building. In British English the spelling is "storey" and the plural is "storeys"; Americans write "story" and "stories." Typically a story equals 10 to 12 feet (3.0-3.6 meters). The origin of this use of the word "story" is not entirely clear, but in medieval times a tier of sculptures or stained glass windows on the front of a cathedral was called a stor(e)y because it usually told a story, and the number of stories was a measure of the size of the building. Unit Definition (gry) The gry is a proposed unit of distance in the English traditional system. The name was first used in June 1679 by the philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) as a unit equal to 0.001 foot, 0.01 inch, or 0.1 line in a decimalized distance system. (Thomas Jefferson, who was very familiar with Locke's writings, later proposed a similar system in the U.S., but he called 0.001 foot a point rather than a gry.) In 1813, the gry was revived in another decimal measurement scheme in Britain. All these ideas failed, but the gry had some limited use in the nineteenth century as a unit equal to 0.1 line or 1/120 inch (0.211 667 millimeter). Long forgotten, the gry recently came back into the limelight in connection with a puzzle, circulating on the Internet, which asked for three English words ending in -gry. The word "gry" is from the ancient Greek, where it meant "a trifling amount".
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