Pood
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Pood (Template:Lang-rus, plural: Template:Transliteration or Template:Transliteration) is a unit of mass equal to 40 funt ({{#invoke:Lang|lang}}, Russian pound). Since 1899 it is set to approximately 16.38 kilograms (36.11 pounds).<ref name="dwip">Template:Cite journal</ref> It was used in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine. Pood was first mentioned in a number of 12th-century documents. Unlike funt, which came at least in the 14th century from Template:Langx, Template:Langx Template:Transliteration (formerly written *{{#invoke:Lang|lang}} Template:Transliteration) is a much older borrowing from Late Latin "pondo", from Classical "pondus".
Use in the past and presentEdit
Together with other units of weight of the Imperial Russian weight measurement system, the USSR officially abolished the pood in 1924. The term remained in widespread use until at least the 1940s.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> In his 1953 short story "Matryona's Place", Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn presents the pood as still in use amongst the Khrushchev-era Soviet peasants.
Its usage is preserved in modern Russian in certain specific cases, e.g., in reference to sports weights, such as traditional Russian kettlebells, cast in multiples and fractions of 16 kg (which is pood rounded to metric units). For example, a 24 kg kettlebell is commonly referred to as "one-and-half pood kettlebell" (Template:Transliteration). It is also sometimes used when reporting the amounts of bulk agricultural production, such as grains or potatoes.
An old Russian proverb reads, "You know a man when you have eaten a pood of salt with him." (Template:Langx)
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Idioms in Slavic languagesEdit
In modern colloquial Russian, the expression Template:Transliteration ({{#invoke:Lang|lang}}) – 'a hundred poods,' an intentional play on the foreign "hundred percent" – imparts the ponderative sense of overwhelming weight to the declarative sentence it is added to. The generic meaning of "very serious" or "absolutely sure"<ref>English-Russian-English dictionary of slang, jargon and Russian names. 2012</ref> has almost supplanted its original meaning of "very heavy weight." The adjective Template:Transliteration and the adverb Template:Transliteration are also used to convey the same sense of certainty.
The word is also used in Polish idiomatically or as a proverb (with the original/strict meaning commonly forgotten): {{#invoke:Lang|lang}} (Polish for 'unsupportable boredoms', literally 'boredoms [that could be measured] in poods')