I’ve learned about them in school, but I’ve never heard anyone say something is 8 decameters long or anything like that. I’m an American.

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We use litres, which is one decimetre cubed. We use hectares, which is one hectometre squared. But the beauty of it is, that you can just convert everything to units that are more widely understood.

  • 1 decimetre = 10 centimetres = .1 metres

  • 1 hectometre = 100 metres = .1 kilometre

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No, some measurements just aren’t used, even when they’d be a good fit.

Like lengths. We never use anything above km. Even for things like space, we say “million km” rather than gigametre.

The closest we come to hectometre is hectare, which is used for land area.

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Megameters are sometimes used, that’s not true.

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Where do you live and what is your profession? I have heard anyone use megameter seriously.

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Germany, studying Cybersecurity. They are used in astronomy through, only a hobby if me.

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Who uses megametres? It’s not something I’ve ever heard in the UK.

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A megameters is 1.000.000 meters.

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in school in austria we teach dezimeter (tenth of a meter)

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decimeter is a good measure because one cubic decimeter (1 dm³) equals one liter ( 1L )

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*of water

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No, you’re thinking of a kilogram. A liter and 1dm³ are identical.

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No, volume dimensions are independent of what a specific volume is filled with.

1 liter of water is 1 cubic decimeter of water just as 1 liter of air is 1 cubic decimeter of air.

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From my experience in Norway, these are typical in context of daily speech:

Weight (gram): tonne (a substitute name for Mg (Mega)), kg, hg, g, mg, μg (mostly in medicine)

Distance (meter): mil (10 km), km, m, dm (kinda rare), cm, mm

Volume (liter): l, dl, cl, ml

In my experience, the deca-predix is very rarely used. Most of the missing prefixes are just substituted for numbers, i.e. saying “a thousand kilometers” is much more common that “a megameter”. Of course, this differs depending on context, as a lot of the prefixes become more common within scientific fields where the sizes are common.

On a separate note, even the numbers can be a bit inconsistent. It has bothered me that it’s often common to say “a thousand milliard” instead of “one billion” (also note that we use the long scale).

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In Germany Hectoliter is also used to calculate beer volume in commercial settings, like planning for a bar or a festival.

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These two specifically - I don’t think I’ve ever seen them.

Hectoliters are sometimes used e.g. for measuring beer consumption for an event, decimeters in some informal contexts, some country commonly describe drink sizes in centiliters or deciliters.

Centimeters are common, I’d say more common than millimeters in informal context.

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