A unit of weight equal to one hundred pounds in the United States or one hundred kilograms in other countries; a quintal.
From Latin 'centum' (hundred) plus '-al' (unit suffix). Developed as a commercial and agricultural term for bulk commodity weights, parallel to the metric 'quintal.'
Before the metric system, every country had different 'hundreds'—the cental was America's way of saying 'one hundred pounds of stuff,' and farmers still sometimes use the word.
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