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>Nobody says or thinks "1 centimeter and 5 millimeters" just like nobody says "I'm 1 meter and 80 centimeters tall". You're "180 centimeters tall" or (less often) "1.8 m tall".

one-eighty is quite common. That might depend on the country and language.

I guess. "One" is shorter than "hundred" in English while it's the other way in Polish (jeden vs sto).

I was very surprised that English people say "fifteen hundred" for 1500, I never thought about that number this way before, it was always "tysiąc pięćset" (one thousand five hundred).

Most English speakers say the year is "fifteen hundred", but it's mostly American people who say "fifteen hundred" in other cases.

en-GB: Today is the thirty-first of August, twenty twenty. The USA has reported an additional one thousand, seven hundred and seventy one Covid-nineteen cases. I would normally leave work around five-thirty, since I can catch the seventeen forty-five train home and watch the end of the six o'clock news. If I miss the train, I might take the two thirty bus instead [i.e. bus 230], or else the one three five.

But that's just a way of pronouncing large numbers; that's still saying '180 centimetres', not '1 [metre and] 80 centimetres'.

Are you sure? Intuitively I would have said, that "I'm one eighty tall" is an abbreviation for "I'm one [meter] [and] 80 [centimeter] tall".

Thinking about it, if I measure something with a folding ruler, I would more naturally say "it's one meter eighty long" (German native speaker here, as already said elsewhere, with other languages YMMV).

But the point still stands. In metric, you can slap the numbers together or separate them, convert them to different units or sprinkle easily units in between or not. It all works. At worst it is just moving the decimal point around or adding/removing zeros. Very easily done in your head.

In German would you say "I'm one four and 80" for 184cm? Cause that's confusing :)

Not confusing to a native speaker :-)

But yes, that's exactly how you would say it in German. There might be some part of the brain reserved to parse that sentence as "I'm (one) (four and 80)" but this doesn't feel weird or confusing at all.

Telephone numbers on the other hand are more confusing. Luckily you don't need to say them out loud anymore these days.

I’d say “one eighty-four” but of course the problem is that in german we mix up the order of the tens and ones.

And in fact so does English — it’s twenty-four but fif-teen (five ten, not ten five). In german we do that until 99 (nine and ninety).

Interestingly, even in English it was common to say things like "five-and-twenty"; it's considered archaic now.

Such as in the nursery rhyme you've now put in my head!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sing_a_Song_of_Sixpence

Well I suppose the nice thing about metric is that it doesn't matter!

You may be convincing me though, since in feet and inches it does matter, and it would mean as you say - 'looks about 10 11' means 10'11", not 1011".

In the UK though we generally don't mix metres and centimetres - '1 8' would mean '1.8' not '1.08', though I'd say the decimal point would rarely be elided, so that's clear.

So I just wouldn't say 1 80 about metres unless the question was 'how many metres' - and then I'd mean 180m.

French people would most commonly say « un mètre quatre-vingt » meaning one meter eighty, centimeters being implied at the end.

this is common in dutch aswell, especially when talking about one's length. "Een meter tachtig" (one meter eighty)

This seems very similar to monetary amounts in at least (most of?) the US and the UK.

"One dollar/pound twenty," etc.

If we're talking about what's common in English, I think it's a little odd to discuss European metric habits in the context of the English language.

While English is a "lingua franca" in Western countries, the two main native-English-speaking countries in Europe are very recent metric adoptees.

Ireland didn't finish adopting the metric system until 2005, so still use imperial units for many colloquial uses; e.g. human height & weight.

The U.K. is further behind, and if you couple that with the nationalistic associations the imperial system will have there, colloquial uses are even more widespread.

I think metric use in English is only going to become more natural and fluent with generational use.

Malta should be included too; They used to be part of the UK till 1964, they still drive on the left side, so no idea how they feel/speak about metric.

Yeah. I prefixed my country listing with "the two main" as I know Malta is also another but I know much much less about habits & metrication there.

It looks to be quite complex https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maltese_units_of_measurement

Also, I think English, while an official language of Malta, is much less dominant than it would be in Ireland (or the UK).

It's been 2 decades since my visit there (totally loved it). English was spoken everywhere, even though Maltese was common as well.

In French, you'd say "je fais 1 mètre 80" (literally "I'm 1 meter 80") and write it 1m80. Saying "180 centimètres" would be weird in a casual conversation, but fine in a professionnal setting. For a weight of 1500g, you'd usually say "1 kilo 5", maybe "1 kilo 500", but rarely "1 kilo 500 grammes".

So yeah, decimals are so used that you don't even need to tell the unit, it's implicit. I once had an american argue with me about Fahrenheit vs Celsius, because "Fahrenheit is more precise". I guess he was either a superhuman who can feel the difference between 20°C and 21°C, or someone who never heard about decimals.

In Polish it's common to use "deko" (ang. deca) especially for weight of groceries. So it's perfectly normal to buy "20 deko sera" instead of "200 gram sera" (both means 200g of cheese)

I find the European 0.5 mm block is very small and cramped - I'm pretty in sure in Australia it's 0.8 mm by standard. Probably my small letters are almost 0.5 mm tall so I don't really know how to fit into 0.5 mm.

Whether this destroys your argument or not, I don't know. I don't think preferred measures really depend on this sort of thing.

Are you using cursive? Cause I've seen some English people use capitalics in handwriting and then it would be hard for sure.

I find 0.5cm grid perfectly fine for writing, prefer it to the 0.9cm line notebooks (we have them too - for "soft" subjects like language learning where you don't need to graph anything).

https://kamionkawielka.szkola.pl/files/zadanie%202%2024.03.j...

(The size of the block is 5 mm or 0.5 cm, not 0.5 mm; I'm sure you know that and it was just a typing error)

You're not supposed to cram your letters into that 5 mm space: you generally use two lines, which gives you a 1 cm lineheight.

That being said, I don't like that raster size for writing. They're nice for drawing schematics and stuff, but for writing I very much prefer a grid of 4mm × 8mm (like this: https://www.dbs.be/images/vergroot/2518_2.jpg).

Wait i do say “one meter and eighty centimeters”!