What is a hundredweight?
A hundredweight, abbreviated as cwt, is a unit of weight commonly used in the imperial system of measurement.
There are two variations on hundredweights; the long hundredweight primarily used in the United Kingdom and the short hundredweight used in the United States.
In the imperial system, a long hundredweight is equal to 112 pounds or approximately 50.8 kilograms. The term "hundredweight" is derived from the fact that it originally represented the weight of 100 pounds of a particular commodity.
The short hundredweight is equal to 100 pounds or 45.35 kilograms.
What are pounds?
Pounds are an imperial unit of weight normally used in the United States but can be found in use in the United Kingdom and Ireland as well. One pound is equal to 0.4536 kilograms.
We provide several conversion calculators from pounds on this site including the most popular: pounds to kilograms.
Note that pounds are normally referring to avoirdupois pounds. This should not be confused with Troy pounds which is used almost exclusively to measure precious metals.