Quintal

The quintal or centner is a historical unit of mass in many countries that is usually defined as 100 base units, such as pounds or kilograms. It is a traditional unit of weight in France, Portugal, and Spain and their former colonies. It is commonly used for grain prices in wholesale markets in Ethiopia, Eritrea and India, where 1 quintal = 100 kg (220 lb). In British English, it referred to the hundredweight; in American English, it formerly referred to an uncommon measurement of 100 kg (220 lb). Languages drawing its cognate name for the weight from Romance languages include French, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish quintal, Italian quintale, Esperanto kvintalo, Polish kwintal. Languages taking their cognates from Germanicized centner include the German Zentner, Lithuanian centneris, Swedish centner, Polish cetnar, Russian and Ukrainian центнер (tsentner) and Estonian tsentner. Many European languages have come to translate both the British hundredweight (8 stone or 112 pounds [50.80 kg]) and the American hundredweight (100 pounds [45.36 kg]), as their cognate form of quintal or centner.