Guides to SI

On this page
[U.S. and Metric System] [NIST Reference] [Correct Usage]
[National Physical Laboratory] [Metrology – SI] 
[James R. Frysinger's Guide] [TheMetricSystem.info]
[metre.info] [SI Units in German and Russian]

Here, NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) offers a Capsule History of metrication in the USA and answers a number of frequently-asked questions. For more on NIST, see NIST/Metric Program.

• Essentials of the SI
• Background
• Bibliography

See also Downloadable Documents for NIST's 1995 Special Publication 811, Guide for the Use of the International System of Units. For more on NIST, see NIST/Metric Program.

This reference is at the U.S. Metric Association web site. Not only does it provide information on the correct usage of SI symbols and prefixes, it also shows a number of the more common incorrect usages.

The NPL site contains a Beginner's Guide to Measurement. The links to its sections are in the menu in the white area of the page. Click on Go or the NPL logo to view the guide.

Alternatively, you may go directly, from here, to the sections on length, mass and temperature.

This guide, at the web site of the Swedish National Testing and Research Institute, includes a diagram showing the relationships among the SI base units and derived units. Although this is a Swedish site, the information is of US origin.

If you need to know the names of the SI units in Chinese, French, German, Greek,  Italian, Japanese,  Russian or Spanish, this is the site to visit. Of course, it has quite a few other topic headings. Click on the language to go directly to the associated page. Click on the Go button to start at the home page.

For several of these pages, your browser must support UTF-8 encoding (Unicode) and the appropriate alphabet. If your browser does not have such capability, you might want to download and install a later version. Links for Microsoft Internet Explorer and Netscape Communicator are provided at the bottom of the About SI Navigator page. For Microsoft Windows, you will also need to visit the Windows Update site, using the built-in Windows Update Manager.

This site was developed as a public service by U.S. Metric Association member, Carl Sorenson. It contains the following sections: Why metric? How to learn the metric system, Overview of important units, The conversion of the U.S., FAQ, Links, and Primary documents.

This site was created by Chris Kaese, in the UK. If you want a complete reference to SI units, plus obsolete metric units, this is the place to go. The site, which uses frames, will open in a new window.

If you know German (or Russian), this page, at the University of Hannover web site, may be of interest. It requires that your browser support UTF-8 encoding (Unicode).

If your browser does not have UTF-8 support, but does have Cyrillic (ISO) support, you can select this alternative page. (The full designation for this code set is ISO 8859-5.)

For those who've used this site in the past, please note that it no longer exists. 

On this page
[U.S. and Metric System] [NIST Reference] [Correct Usage]
[National Physical Laboratory] [Metrology – SI] 
[James R. Frysinger's Guide] [TheMetricSystem.info]
[metre.info] [SI Units in German and Russian]