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Hmm, don't see a big deal. Maybe it is a big deal to someone striving for some engineering beauty and consistency, but in every day life, centimeters and decimeters even are popular because they relate to sizes on human scale -- size of a palm, thickness of a finger and so on.

But I grew up with those units and didn't encounter them first in the university or high school. Just have everything be divisible by 10 is easy enough and knowing the prefixes is easy.

I was very confused and still am by inches, yards, stones, pounds, ounces, gallons. I don't know how many in each of each.




You feel a bit of the effect when you go to a country which uses different metric units. For instance in Sweden you commonly have hekto (= hectogram = 100 g) and mil (= 10 km). Or Germany where Pfund is still common (500 g). It will make you need to think a bit at first.


I never encounter decimeter. Centiliter only for shot glasses, every kitchen measure thing I have only shows mLiter. Same with grams. There are no centi/decigram on my kitchen weighing scales.


deciliter is very common in cookery here in Norway.


It was in Eastern Europe, ex Soviet block.




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