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The quintal or centner is a historical unit of mass in many countries that is usually defined as 100 base units, such as pounds or . It is a traditional unit of weight in France, Portugal, and Spain and their former colonies. It is commonly used for grain prices in wholesale markets in Ethiopia, Eritrea and India, where 1 quintal = .
In British English, it referred to the hundredweight; in American English, it formerly referred to an uncommon measurement of .
Languages drawing its cognate name for the weight from Romance languages include French, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish quintal, Italian quintale, Esperanto kvintalo, Polish kwintal. Languages taking their cognates from Germanicized centner include the German Zentner, Lithuanian centneris, Swedish centner, Polish cetnar, Russian and Ukrainian центнер (tsentner) and Estonian tsentner.
Many European languages have come to translate both the imperial units hundredweight (8 stone or ) and the American hundredweight (), as their cognate form of quintal or centner.
In Albania (kuintal), Ethiopia (kuntal), and India, the definition may have been introduced via Islamic trade. It is a standard measurement of mass for agricultural products in those countries.
In France it used to be defined as 100 livres (pounds), about , and has been redefined as 100 kg (mesures usuelles), thus called metric quintal with symbol qq. In Spain, the quintal is still defined as 100 libras, or about , but the metric quintal is also defined as 100 kg;Real Academia Española's definition of quintal In Portugal a quintal is 128 arráteis or about .
The German Zentner]] and the Danish centner]] are pound-based, and thus since metrication are defined as , whereas the Austrian and Swiss Zentner since metrication has been re-defined as 100 kg. In Germany a measure of 100 kg is named a Doppelzentner.
In Italy, the quintale]] is commonly used to refer to 100 kg and is abbreviated to q, but the usage is considered informal and is not considered legally valid since 1990.
Common agricultural units used in the Soviet Union were the 100 kg tsentner (центнер) and the term "tsentner per hectare". These are still used by countries that were part of the Soviet Union.
The quintal was defined in the United States in 1866 Act of July 28, 1866, codified in 15 U.S.C. §205 as . However, it is no longer used in the United States or by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), though it still appears in the statute."Metric System of Measurement: Interpretation of the International System of Units for the United States", Federal Register notice of July 28, 1998, 63 F.R. 40333
In France, Italy, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Indonesia, and India, it is still in daily use by farmers. It is also used in Brazil and other South American countries and in some African countries including Angola.
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