Hey Mythcreants! My question is short: How can I put in fantasy measurement units without comparing them to real-life units (like the mile, the foot, the minute, etc.)?
Evan
Hey Evan, great to hear from you again!
Units of measurements are one of those things that normally fade into the background, except for when they don’t match expectations. Everyone learns these units as children and then rarely thinks about them, so drawing attention to them can be really jarring, even if it’s for explanatory purposes. In stories, you basically have four options.
1. Use Real Measurements
While a fantasy setting wouldn’t actually have minutes, hours, inches, miles, etc., you can usually just include them and no one will notice. This is the simplest option, though it tends to work better for units that are not also proper names. “Meters” sounds a lot more natural in a fantasy setting than “Friday,” for whatever reason. And, of course, American readers (possibly also British, Liberian, and Burmese readers) will accept imperial units more easily than metric, and it will be the opposite for everyone else.
At the very least, this method is better than using made up units that correspond exactly to real units. Farscape did that, with “microns” and “microts” instead of minutes and seconds, which was just annoying.*
2. Use Fantasy-Sounding Measurements
You can also use historical units of measurements that, to an American audience at least, sound more at home in fantasy. “League” or “pace,” for example, have a more historical feeling. The downside is that readers won’t automatically know how long those actually are, so it may get confusing.
3. Use Descriptive Measurements
Most units of measurement have fairly arbitrary sounding names, but they don’t necessarily have to. In your setting, you might use “ten-day” to refer to a set of days which is ten days long or “moon cycle” in place of “months.” This gets a little trickier for smaller units, but you could still do it. Perhaps they use “heartbeats” instead of “seconds,” that sort of thing.
4. Explain Your Fantasy Measurements
Finally, you can dedicate space to explaining your fantasy units. You might have a character take five steps, say they’ve moved one “letra,” and readers will know a letra is about five steps. This is by far the most involved and intrusive method, so I’d only recommend it if having a unique system of measurement is very important to your story.
Hope that answers your question, and good luck with your story!
Keep the answer engine fueled by becoming a patron today. Want to ask something? Submit your question here.
>“Meters” sounds a lot more natural in a fantasy setting than “Friday,” for whatever reason
Have to disagree. To me (American), “meters” sounds SF, not Fantasy
–
I always liked the made-up time units in Farscape and the original Battlestar Galactica
–
Note that if you use “moons” instead of “months” you might sound like the old stereotype of “Native American dialect” you get in old Westerns
You might sound like a stereotype (Huga-Muga Talk), but I think it’s safe to say that this isn’t an accurate perception. Months on Earth are based on the phases of the moon, and “moons” was used as a term for months in Europe at least (I can’t speak to how other cultures dealt with time). As long as you’re careful with the rest of the dialect you should be fine.
This again continued to the edge of what we’d consider industrialization. In the 1700s/early 1800s the British Royal Navy paid their officers wages on a lunar cycle, and changed their codes on lunar timetables. Given that they were at the mercy of wind and tide–galleys being too fragile for blue-water sailing and steam only just starting to be used–this makes perfect sense. The sailors were paid on a cycle that they were used to thinking in.
And of course we’re talking fantasy and sci-fi here, so there’s always the possibility of the world having no moon, having multiple moons, or BEING a moon, all of which alter or invalidate the concept of a month. We tend to think months are fundamental, but that’s only because we live on a planet where the concept makes sense; put us somewhere else and it becomes very confusing.
It goes to show that, again, culture is the dominant force here. Global forcing mechanisms are translated through regional conditions into local effects.
To British audience you’ll just sound archaic if you say “moon.”
I liked the Farscape units as well.
Unless the protagonist has measuring devices handy, estimates based on the human body (hairsbreadth, finger-width, hands-breadth, foot-length, arms-length etc.) would work for most historical and fantasy settings, I think.
A fantasy/mediaeval warrior might use sword-length, spear-length, bow-shot, and so on.
Some measurements just aren’t important to the plot; I can never remember how many Knuts to the Sickle, and how many Sickles to the Galleon, but one can enjoy Harry Potter without knowing that.
There’s a set of measurements from (I believe) ancient China, based on a set of nesting bronze bowls – their diameters were the units of length, their weights the units of weight, their capacities the units of volume, and the sounds they made when struck the scale of musical notes.
Introducing something like that as part of establishing the setting could work.
Units based on the human body (e.g. cubits and feet) are culture-agnostic and therefore reasonable in any setting with humans, but they can also offer interesting details: standardized differently and/or more or less strictly by different groups, based on the body of different people (e.g. fantasy dwarfs), conflicting with other unit systems.
Animals, plants and physical phenomena can offer equally reasonable and more culturally significant standards: standardizing the weight of a coconut or the length of a flamingo skull or the melting temperature of aluminium means that these things are common and important.
Technology-driven standards are comparatively fragile: weapon sizes, for example, are very unlikely to be standardized beyond a very specific manufacturing model and subject to rapid obsolescence and confusion.
The worse units of all are those that are tied to real-world arbitrary choices, like meters (a fraction of Earth circumference).
For instance, 0°C is the temperature at which water freezes whereas 100°C is the temperature at which water evaporates, which means it’s based on physical phenomena (although those would shift slightly, depending where on earth they are measured, as pressure is different at sea level and high up in the mountains – °C are usually measured at sea level).
“Microns” is actually how a lot of scientists verbally abbreviate the unit of measurement “micrometers.” Reading that in a book as a unit of time would confuse me so much!
Swedish reader here, so grew up with meters, kilograms etc:
I agree with Kenneth above that bodyparts sound natural in a low-tech setting, since many different cultures had something like this in the past, even if they don’t use it now. But it only really works for me if it’s just like one or two, or else if the exact measurement isn’t that important. Like, someone sees a snake and it’s two feet tall, ok, I spontaneously get a picture in my head of how long this snake is, because I’m a human being and have some idea of the usual adult foot size of my species. Or suppose someone strains to recognize another person who stands a hundred feet away – fine, they’re too far to see clearly, I get it, details don’t matter much here.
But I’ve come across a person who reaches a wall that’s five feet tall, and now I’m like… uh? Is that tall? Is it too tall to climb? Easily climbable? Perhaps even jumpable?
I have to pause my reading and do some math in my head in order to get a picture of what this wall is like.
So in that situation, I’d prefer “a wall a little higher than they [MC] was tall” or something along these lines.
Measurements based on a body part (cubit, foot, inch, etc) work well in pre-industrial societies. So do measurements based on something common in their world–individual grains, for example, can be used for measurements of weight or length at very small scales (see the history of karats). The point isn’t to be precise; it’s to be useful. You can use your foot to make sure the length of the boards are equal; you can use your pace to know how far you’ve gone; you can count the grains of rice on a scale. This stuff is the sort of thing an illiterate peasant farmer could do easily. There’s natural variance in the units, but that’s usually below the natural variance in how these things are done, so it’s irrelevant.
This sort of thing continued more or less to the start of the industrial era. Historic accounts of naval actions include “cable’s length”, “pistol shot”, and the like for range, and their contemporaries in the army describe distances in leagues (the distance a person can walk in an hour, about 3 miles). We do the same thing in our time–lightyears are a measure based on easily-determined factors, for example. Once you start getting into the industrial era you end up needing multiple people to reproduce precise measurements (tolerances of 1/10,000 of an inch are common in machines), so you need to standardize things a lot more.
I would avoid using lengths of weapons, because that’s often non-standard even by pre-industrial standards. Different spears are different lengths, and swords can vary widely from short swords that almost qualify as daggers, up to anti-cavalry weapons.
All of that said, culture will always play a role. What a culture measures is what they value, and different cultures value different things. Metric units value precision and reproducibility; imperial units value ease of use. (Yes, really. The issue is that yards, inches, and feet measured different things–they have weird conversion factors because translating from feet to miles is more akin to translating from imperial to metric than from meters to kilometers.) To give another real-world example: Acres didn’t start out as a unit of area, but as a unit of time. They were the amount of land a person could handle in a day–an important thing when scheduling and planning, more so than absolute surface area. So what your culture values is going to play a HUGE role in how your units are set up.
Or you can do what I did in a certain long-ago Warriors fanfic and use “robin-widths” and “bear-lengths.” So intuitive!
In a space-SF setting with multiple planets, you may need a timekeeping system that’s independent of planetary motion. I was thinking of a “powers of 10” type of timekeeping starting with a “day”. A “day” would be “zero-ex” or 10^0. A “week” would be “one-ex” or 10^1 or 10 days. “Two-ex” would be about 2.5 months. A “Three-ex” is 2 years, 9 months. And so on. A culture brought up with this measurement would have a better sense of how long a given number of days is.
Of course, relativity puts a lot of complications in any attempt to set up a universal timekeeping system. And not every culture may want to use such a system, particularly if they’re alien (and therefore probably less likely to use Base 10 in the first place.) Just some things I thought of upon seeing this.
A tip I’ve heard is to avoid using numbers and units of measurement whenever possible. For example:
Instead of “The town is 50 miles away” – “It will take us half a day to ride there”
“a 10-foot-tall wall” – “a wall twice her height”
This isn’t always possible, but if you can make it work, it can also imply an opinion of the thing being measured. (In both my examples, you can tell the things are obstacles just from one sentence.)
I agree with this method. Just from a practical standpoint – I for one have trouble visualising actual measurements, so showing things either in relation to the character (“The wall was nearly the times her height”) or in comparison to something I’d likely be familiar with (“The beast stood the size of a large horse”) helps me both visualise the object and understand the sort of challenge it might pose far better than actual numbers.
I agree. It’s often better to suggest what it means for the characters than to rely on numbers. ‘A wall twice her height’ is clearly an obstacle, even to a trained climber. If it takes half a day to ride to a place, that means it’s not somewhere you can go for a quick trip, yet it’s also not far away (a far-away place would probably need days or even weeks or months to reach).
As I’m German and thus used to the metric system, I’ve had to develop an idea of how long a foot or an inch is to understand a lot of books. I love yards as measurement in books written by British or American authors, because the yard is thankfully quite close to a meter and so I can just mentally replace ‘yard’ with ‘meter’ and I know approximately how long something is.
When I read ‘a wall twice her height’ instead of ‘a ten-foot’ wall (approximately 3 meters, I believe), it’s much easier for me to judge that wall.
I just looked it up, and yes, a yard is 91 cm! I didn’t know that! For some reason, I’ve always thought that a yard is shorter than that.
Stupid Americans with their stupid-ass measurements.
We need more descriptions in one-and-a-half yards instead of five feet!
One-and-half yards is four-foot-six, not five feet!
The rule of thumb we were given when Britain began switching to metric was that a metre is a yard-and-an-inch.
My childhood was pre-metric; my first school jotter had a table of ‘Useful Measurements’ on the back cover – which included chains, poles, and perches!
Which is precisely why it’s so hard to understand all those different Imperial measurements when you’re used to metric. Metric system is easy, all follows the principle of 10, 100, or 1000. One meter is one hundred centimeters. One kilometer is one thousand meters. Ten millimeters are one centimeter. It takes twelve inches for one foot – why twelve! I personally can’t even imagine a yard and an inch, that’s why I use 1 yard approximates 1 meter just to make things easiser for myself. I know the measurement is not precise enough to calculate with it, but it gives me a picture in my head.
Whenever I read a height measurement in feet and inches, I pick up my phone, because the calculator on that one has functions for lengths to calculate them through. My personal height is 1.68 meters or 168 centimeters. In feet and inches, that means I’m 5 foot 5 inches, according to my calculator. Up to 1.70 meters, everyone is 5-foot-5. That’s two centimeters! Two hundredth of a meter!
Timothy Zahn’s Conquerer trilogy had a set of time units for its POV aliens that I quite liked.
The weak link was “cyclic” for year (which sounded like Zahn didn’t want to use cycle).
A day was broken into a fore-arc, mid-arc, and late-arc, with the whole referred to as a full-arc, and a tenth-arc corresponding roughly to an hour in terms of how the aliens conceptualised what could be accomplished. I liked this because it’s not really how English time units are formulated, but was easily comprehensible.
Then there was a beat, analogous to a second, and easily mappable to a hearbeat. And a hunbeat, which was never explicitly stated to be a hundred beats, but maps easily to a minute conceptually. It was never stated how many hunbeats there were in a tenth-arc.
At any rate, it was easy to follow when the aliens talked about it.
The fundamental question here is, what is the purpose of including the measurement in the first place?
One purpose is to allow the reader to visualize the scene. The wall is four feet high–about chest height on me. I can hide behind it while still popping up to see what’s going on or to engage in combat. The person was a thousand meters away–if it’s clear ground I can see that they exist, and that’s about it. It helps the reader build a visual picture of what’s going on.
A second purpose is world-building. A Medieval farmer is going to use organic, easily-identifiable measures–hand width, pace length, how much they can hold in their hands–because that’s what they’ve got. A peasant talking about meters is going to be jarring, since they don’t have the tools, technology, or history necessary for the concept of a meter to come into existence. On the flip side, while I’m okay with a space battleship captain talking about feet (I’m American), the instant they start talking about paces or grains or other organic measures I’m out. Such people need precise, reproducible measurements to survive.
If you’re really good at world-building you use units of measure as integral parts of the story. Tolkien and O’Brian often foreshadowed key plot points in distances, for example.
A third is to lend authenticity to dialogue. A peasant will, again, use organic measures because that’s how they actually spoke. A scientist is going to be more precise because that’s how we’re trained. This is more related to characterization than world-building, though the two overlap a lot.
Only one of these really focuses on the reader. And given what I’ve seen, it’s the weakest reason. Not because it’s not valuable–it is–but because the reader quickly either gets a sense of the units involved or simply ignores them and moves on. So in the end, unless you enjoy making up units of measurement (and I’m one who does!), it seems mostly irrelevant.
I think measuring units should be real world ones unless there are some very compelling reasons for them not to be. There probably aren’t. When giving a measurement, it has to be for some reason and the writer wants the reader to know whether this is a lot or a little. Using real world measurements are just comprehensible. Even if using old-fashioned terms, the reader can just google what a stone is or much volume is in a tun of wine, etc.
I’d even go further and say it is acceptable to use real world names for months and days in off world Fantasy and science fiction because it will help readers keep track of when things are happening. It might not make literal sense in a story that has nothing to do with Earth but I think expecting readers to keep track of a fictional calendar is more than a little unfair. I’d also expect many writers aren’t precise enough to keep track of their own made up calendar. So if chronology and when things are important, it is safer to use a real world calendar rather than a made up one. They will also sound less stupid to readers.
For months, an easy one could be something like “it was the third moon of winter, the days were getting brighter, and spring was drawing nearer” if you do medeival-style fantasy in another world. The problem is replacing our familiar names of months with unfamiliar ones.
“The Case Files of Henri Davenforth” uses ‘moons’ like this:
January – Old Moon; February – Snow Moon; March – Crow Moon; etc. You can see this comes from farming traditions, even though the world is roughly 1910s-1920s in development, but with both magic and technology (there are cars akin to the Ford T, for instance, but Henri is also a Medical Examiner and the kingdom has three, later four, royal mages).
For days, the author uses, for instance, Gods Day (Sunday), Gather Day (Monday), or Hex Day (Thursday), suggesting that certain activities were originally connected to those days.
Since the series has a human from earth in it (Jamie got kidnapped and magically altered by a witch before the beginning of the first novel), there’s a list in the back where you can look that up – her notes on her new world. There are also sentences like ‘That Gather Day – I still think of it as Monday -, …’ which helps make the connection in the story. Also, days and months are rarely mentioned, unless it’s to signify that time has passed (for instance during the weekend – the books are fantasy police procedurals and Jamie and Henri do take time off to rest when possible).
Fantasy measurements do not have to be exact. Historically, measurements were not exact until only a few centuries ago. Instead of worrying about measurements, worrying about how much time it will take your characters. If you need your characters to make a journey in 10 days, then it takes 10 days regardless of distance. Now all you need to do is figure out how.