Metric Meaning
/ˈmɛt.ɹɪk/Definition, CEFR level B1, pronunciation, examples, and quiz.
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Definition
adjOf or relating to the metric system of measurement.
adjOf or relating to the meter of a piece of music.
Sentence Examples
Conversion to the metric system was opposed by tool manufacturers.
I still have to mentally do the conversion from metric into imperial.
CEFR Practice Quiz
The scientist used the ____ system to measure the liquid in litres.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Most countries around the world use the ____ system for all their official measurements of length, weight, and volume.
Word Origin & History
From French métrique (1864), from New Latin metricus (“pertaining to the system based on the meter”), from metrum (“a meter”); see meter. By surface analysis, metre + -ic.
Literary Quotations & Historical Citations
"But the red planet has been a graveyard for Russian, European and American missions, including an embarrassing 1999 NASA fail caused when a computer, running on metric numbers, and engineers, dealing in nonmetric numbers, got their signals crossed."
— 2018 December 24, The Editorial Board, “Yes, Virginia, there is good news this Christmas”, in USA Today:
"As for the large number of official statements that Spain is safe, I think they are merely a metric of the complacency that has characterised the European crisis from the start."
— 2011 April 10, Financial Times:
"Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month."
— 2013 August 3, “Boundary problems”, in The Economist, volume 408, number 8847:
"The insight underlying such wordlists is that frequency, combined with metrics such as range and dispersion, profiles for teachers and students the relative usefulness of words."
— 2018, Clarence Green, James Lambert, “Advancing disciplinary literacy through English for academic purposes: Discipline-specific wordlists, collocations and word families for eight secondary subjects”, in Journal of English for Academic Purposes, volume 35, →DOI, page 106:
"Ibanez had seen things with worse implications for herself, personally. That was the only metric of horror on which this sight knew remote equal. It was a wall, in a basic sense. It stretched from one side of the tunnel to the other, floor to ceiling, barring further passage. It was pink. It bubbled inside, and it sounded like a hundred simultaneous cases of indigestion which echoed off the rock around it."
— 2023 October 12, HarryBlank, “Fire in the Hole”, in SCP Foundation, archived from the original on 22 May 2024:
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CEFR Practice Quiz
The scientist used the ____ system to measure the liquid in litres.
CEFR Practice Quiz (Alternate)
Most countries around the world use the ____ system for all their official measurements of length, weight, and volume.