Names work well because the actual size of a mattress isn't really important to most mattress discussions, nor are the measurements ever 100% accurate because of differences in material or manufacture. If I'm at the shop buying sheets and I remember my queen mattress is roughly ~1.5m wide, is it a 1.37m wide double mattress or a 1.53m wide queen mattress? Using a name placeholder avoids this ambiguity, a queen sheet will always fit a queen bed, within some margin of error, even accounting for differences in material: I imagine foam is more ductile than spring mattresses so might be made a bit bigger to account for this difference.
I guess that would work well in a situation where there is a limited set of sizes. We'd be stuck with about 15 different names here. I wonder if there is some size distribution difference, for example, almost all hotel beds in the US and the UK are too short, yet very wide for me.
And yet, at the hardware store, you by two-by-four, and if someone suggested that that should be called a duke-size instead, you would think they were off their rocker.
