Expensive to get wrongUnited Kingdom

The UK: not a metric market in practice

The United Kingdom runs on the imperial system for everyday quantities while its law is metric. Net-content declarations, serving sizes, storage instructions and every dimension on a pack artwork have to be produced for this market rather than translated into it.

A metric-only artwork pipeline needs a second set of plates for this market, not a second language.

86 of a possible 90Tier B, systematic first-party observation. Nothing at this tier is allowed past 90, however good it looks.

Verified September 9, 2026Rechecked every 1095 days, next by September 8, 2029.

Constraint

Held since January 1, 2010A rule, law or policy that limits what you may do or say. The earliest date we are willing to say this held. It may well have been true before that; we do not backdate a record past the evidence we have read. Supported, version 1.

This entry is wrong if

The current Unicode CLDR release records the United Kingdom as a metric market for everyday measurement, or the market’s weights-and-measures law stops permitting non-metric declarations on consumer packaging.

Written before the record was published, not after. If you can show this, send it to hello@tryorbt.com and the correction goes on the record with the entry.

Evidence

Tier Bofficial-statistic
Unicode Consortium: Unicode CLDR 48 supplemental data
CLDR measurementData states this for GB rather than inheriting metric.
Read 2026-08-10 · CC BY · about this source

History

v1createdAugust 10, 2026
Derived from the measurement-system family on 2026-08-10.

Append-only. Nothing in this list is edited or removed once written, including the entries that record our own mistakes. Every change to every record is on the corrections page, and the same log is in entries.json under revisions.

Cite this entry

“The UK: not a metric market in practice”, The Orbt Market Index 0.1.0, entry omr:gb:surface:measurement-system, retrieved September 9, 2026, https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/gb--surface--measurement-system. Dataset: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22679129

Orbt, "The UK: not a metric market in practice," Orbt Market Index, entry omr:gb:surface:measurement-system, verified September 9, 2026, https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/gb--surface--measurement-system.

@misc{orbt-gb-surface-measurement-system,
  title        = {The UK: not a metric market in practice},
  author       = {{Orbt}},
  year         = {2026},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.22679129},
  note         = {The Orbt Market Index 0.1.0 (dataset DOI 10.5281/zenodo.22679129), entry omr:gb:surface:measurement-system. Verified 2026-09-09},
  howpublished = {\url{https://tryorbt.com/markets/entry/gb--surface--measurement-system}},
  license      = {Orbt Index Public Licence. Free to quote and cite; not to redistribute}
}

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This entry is wrong if

Evidence

History

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