Stone to Kilograms

How to use Stone to KG Converter

1. 1
   Enter the stone. For stone and pounds, divide the pounds by fourteen and add — 11 st 7 lb is 11.5.
2. 2
   Read the kilograms. With the total in pounds underneath.

About converting stone to kilograms

The stone is a survival, and an unusually persistent one. Before standardisation it was a unit whose size depended on what was being weighed: the wool stone, the meat stone and several regional variants all differed, which was workable when trade was local and became untenable when it was not. The fourteen-pound stone was fixed by the Weights and Measures Act of 1835 and everything else was gradually abandoned. What kept it alive in Britain and Ireland is body weight specifically. The unit is well sized for the purpose — an adult range of roughly seven to twenty stone maps onto small numbers with a useful granularity, in a way that pounds alone do not and kilograms only partly do. That is why British medical records hold kilograms while British conversation holds stone, and why converting between them is a daily occurrence for anyone reading their own notes. The arithmetic trap is the same as with feet and inches: fourteen pounds to the stone means the decimal part is not pounds. Eleven and a half stone is 11 st 7 lb, not 11 st 5 lb, and treating 11.5 as eleven stone five is an error of nearly a kilogram.

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