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kWh

kWh

(OP)
In the acronym kWh, Why is the W capitalized? Never really gave it much thought until someone asked about it.
Thanks
Blacklabs

RE: kWh

names of units derived from proper names are capitalized

TTFN

RE: kWh

(OP)
The proper name being James Watt of Steam Engine Fame?

RE: kWh

Yes. James with the tea-kettle.

RE: kWh

4
Yes, along with Volt (V) for Allesandro Volta, Amp (A) for Andre'-Marie Ampere, Farad (F) for Micheal Faraday, Hery (H) for Joeph Henry and Ohm (Greek symbol Omega) for George Simon Ohm.

We really should have named something more prominant after Nikola Tesla if you ask me (but nobody did). A unified unit of motor power (instead of HP or kW) would have been more appropriate than a magnetic flux measurement (T) of 1 Wb per square meter. A Weber (Wb), of course comes from Wilhelm Eduard Weber.

The only term we accept abbreviated with a lower case letter is a Joule, (J or j), named after James Prescot Joule. I have no idea why the lower case is considered acceptable, but it is.

I actually did an entire term paper on the etymology of electrical terminology and got an A on it. Now it rattles around in my head uselessly until I can answer that kind of question or need to win a bar bet.

Cheers!

"Venditori de oleum-vipera non vigere excordis populi"


RE: kWh

isn't it KWh, as in K=1000, M=10^6, etc. and m=10^-3, p=10^-9, etc. ie capitalize the K?

Keith Kropf
Key Largo, Florida

RE: kWh

Not that there is any ambiguity, but j is too much like j, as in root(-1).  

The conversation with the mathematicians (including my wife) usually goes something like this:

"Why don't you use i for the square root of minus one, like everyone else does?"

"Because i is for current."

"Why don't you use C for current?"

"Because that is for capacitance."

There seems to be no argument with that one.

Regards,
William

RE: kWh

k as in kilo is lowercase.

Regards,
William

RE: kWh

k2panman,
weh3 is correct, k as in kilo is always supposed to be lower case, although it is very common to see it misrepresented as upper case. Upper case K is the abbreviation for Degrees Kelvin (and Karat, the gold content in jewelry). Unfortunately, when the computer industry adopted the representation of 1024 bytes to be "1000 bytes", they mistakenly used an upper case K, so now we are stuck with Kb as a term for kilobytes, but technically that has always been incorrect. It should have been kb.

At some point when the vast majority does something wrong, we often change the definition of right!

RE: kWh

True enough, jraef.  Unfortunately for some of us grammar purists, usage is the ultimate arbiter of correctness.  After all, what is correct French but some pretty bad Latin?

William

RE: kWh

Fortunately, the byte is NOT an SI unit.

As for joules, the symbol is an upper-case "J."  see:
http://physics.nist.gov/cuu/Units/units.html

The spelled out unit is lower-case, except for the "degree Celsius."

TTFN

RE: kWh

Actually in common usage 1 Kb is 1024 bits, not bytes. (128 Bytes).
we mostly use a upercase B when we mean bytes - 8 Kb is 1KB.

Needless to say, this is mixed up more than a few times.
C is for coulomb, a unit of charge, while capacitance is farhad (F)




RE: kWh

Woops, my bad. I should have known better....
Every now and then my tendancy to be hasty bytes me in the rear a bit.

"Venditori de oleum-vipera non vigere excordis populi"


RE: kWh

I just noticed one other thing.  

Thermodynamic temperature unit is kelvin, without the degree and symbol K.

TTFN

RE: kWh

Only unit of measurement that has capital letter, as far as I know, which is not derived from a proper name is Liter or Litre.

RE: kWh

It is true that the unit C stands for Coulombs, but C in formulae is capacitance by the same reasoning that i is for current.

As for quark's statement, what about meters and grams?

William

RE: kWh

Jghrist,

Thanks for the correction.

RE: kWh

L is used rather than 'l' because 'l' looks too much like '1'.

In the above sentence, the last character is a 'one', whereas the others are lowercase L's.

RE: kWh

1 ju57 c@n'7 533 wh@t @11 7h3 fu55 i5 @b0u7.
c0n73x7 i5 3v3ry7h1n9!

RE: kWh

Litre (capitalised at the start of the sentence!) is often represented as a stylised lower case l, one which has the appearance of a handwritten character. I'm curious as to the validity or otherwise of this?

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