Download top and best high-quality free Yard PNG Transparent Images backgrounds available in various sizes. To view the full PNG size resolution click on any of the below image thumbnail.

License Info: Creative Commons 4.0 BY-NC

The yard (symbol: yd) is an English unit of length that equals 3 feet or 36 inches in both the British imperial and US customary measuring systems. It has been standardized at exactly 0.9144 meters by international agreement since 1959. A mile is 1,760 yards long.

The US survey yard is very slightly longer.

The term comes from the Old English words GERD, gyrd, and gyrd, which were used to describe branches, staves, and measuring rods. It first appears in the late-seventh-century statutes of Ine of Wessex, where “yard of land” refers to the yardland, an old English tax assessment unit equivalent to 14 hides.

Around the same period, it was employed for a branch shaken by the wind in the Lindisfarne Gospels account of the messengers from John the Baptist in the Gospel of Matthew. In addition to the yardland, Old and Middle English both used their versions of “yard” to refer to the 15 or 16+12 ft surveying lengths used in estimating acres, a distance is now known as the “rod.”

A law from approximately 1300 (see below) mentions a unit of three English feet. However, it is referred to as an ell (Latin: ulna, lit. “arm”), a different and typically lengthier unit of around 45 inches. The word “yard” (Middle English: erd or erde) was originally used to denote this length in Langland’s poem on Piers Plowman. The custom appears to have originated with the king and his magistrates’ prototype standard rods (see below).

In the sense of an enclosed area of land, the term “yard” is a homonym of “yard.” The derivation of this second meaning of “yard” is connected to the term “garden” and has nothing to do with the unit of measurement.

The origins of the metric are unknown. Both the Romans and the Welsh employed multiples of a shorter foot, but a “step” (gradus) was 2+12 Roman feet, and a “pace” was 3 Welsh feet (cam). The Proto-Germanic cubit or arm’s length was reconstructed as *alinâ, which evolved into the Old English ln, Middle English elne, and contemporary ell of 114 yd.

Some have derived the yard of three English feet from pacing, while others have derived it from the ell or cubit, and still, others have derived it from Henry I’s arm standard. Some speculate that the other “yard” got its name from the circumference of a person’s waist, while others believe it came from a cubic measurement.

The measurement standard has traditionally been derived from a human bodily component, such as a foot, the length of an arm, or the span of a hand, or natural things, such as a barleycorn or other grain. On the other hand, the yard was the first standard used by early English monarchs and was said to be based on the Saxon race’s chest width.

The yard was used until Henry VII’s reign when the ell (a yard and a quarter, or 45 inches) was established. The drapers in Paris loaned us the ell. Queen Elizabeth, on the other hand, reintroduced the yard as the English unit of measurement.

Download Yard PNG images transparent gallery.