Talk:Micrometre/Archive 1

Approve name of article
This was claimed to be merged with metre, but wasn't. It would also be silly to have a micron article we can link to, for the deprecated old name of this unit, and not have a name we can link to for the unit itself. Gene Nygaard 04:28, 8 August 2005 (UTC)

Suggestion to move "Input" section to mu
the input section has no relevence to the unit of micrometre, and should really be moved to the article for the greek letter mu, IMHO. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.227.79.25 (talk) 09:02, 27 October 2008 (UTC)


 * I agree completely—I went and did it, but I added a See Also for the character. —johndburger 21:44, 16 January 2009 (UTC)

are µm illegal?
When using meassurements less than a millimetre, some resort to speaking of fractions of a millimetre, as if µm are illegal. Well, is it? --82.134.28.194 (talk) 11:21, 2 September 2010 (UTC)


 * Of course not! It is just describing...Mannix Chan (talk) 13:00, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

Cultural references
In "Battlestar Galactica," the original series, the humans use microns as a macroscopic unit when determining proximity i space.72.84.134.203 (talk) 02:54, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

Micrometre/Micrometer - homonym?
The article states that one reason for using microns is that there could be confusion caused by micrometre and micrometer being homonyms in American English. Is this actually the case? Why isn't it pronounced "mi-CROM-eter", as in "ba-ROM-eter", "al-TIM-eter", "spec-TROM-eter", etc? Tuskah (talk) 14:38, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * The instrument generally is, not the measurement. Homonym is ambiguous here, I'll substitute homograph instead whcich makes the presumed intended meaning clear. Crispmuncher (talk) 15:20, 6 June 2012 (UTC).
 * I'm not a reliable source unto myself, but as an American engineer familiar with both things I can attest that I have never heard anyone homonymize the pronunciation. MI-cro-meter, vs. mi-CROM-eter; the second vowel ("o") is not just different in stress but also pronunciation, pronounced like boat for 10^-6 m, and like bomb for the measuring device. siafu (talk) 16:00, 6 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I'm a month late in seeing this discussion's existence. There are multple word senses of homonym. The most carefully prescriptive one is (homophone AND homograph). The less careful ones are homophone OR homograph. It is only by confusion about which sense was meant that anyone thought that this article was alleging that the unit's name and the device's name could be homophones. But that's not what's being communicated. What's meant (which User:Crispmuncher helpfully clarified) is that in mainstream American spelling, the unit's name and the device's name are homographs, and that's probably why the name micron has held on as strongly as it has in common usage in industry, despite being deprecated by science. I'm removing the "dubious" tag, because the only dubiousness was when the intended meaning was misunderstood. — ¾-10 01:24, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Ok but the base level question remains: how is the word pronounced in this context? It needs an IPA. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 12.155.135.82 (talk) 21:13, 4 February 2013 (UTC)


 * Done. . — ¾-10 02:56, 6 February 2013 (UTC)

ISI
"...but officially revoked by the ISI..." — what is ISI here? Possibly SI? Burzuchius (talk) 19:50, 29 September 2012 (UTC)
 * In this context, the term should be SI. I have corrected this mistake. Wcp07 (talk) 04:48, 1 June 2013 (UTC)