Rice and Metres

I still suck at reading traditional Chinese, but I'm improving bit by bit.

One thing I noticed is that many characters have multiple definitions, much as some English words have several disparate meanings, depending on context, such as fly (you can fly in a plane, zip up your fly, swat a fly, or be super fly, to mention but a few uses).

One similar use in Chinese is the word maih (米), which primarily refers to uncooked rice. But it also means metre, and is often used on Hong Kong road signs to tell drivers how near construction is located, eg. 200 米. I can't say why the character for rice was used instead of something else, but in a way it makes sense as maih only had one definition prior to including metre. Then again, I can't tell you how fly came to mean the opening on one's pants.

Perhaps it is because metre is a foreign unit of measurement (determined by the French in 1793 as one ten-millionth of the distance along the meridian from Earth's equator to the North Pole; only later was it discovered that the metre's length was inaccurate owing to Earth being an oblate spheroid and not a perfect sphere. Today a metre is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum, ie. 1/299,792,458 of a second), and thus a word had to be selected to best represent the concept.

Given that rice plants typically grow at least one metre tall (or higher depending on the variety), it's as good a reason as any.

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