Pood (Russian:пуд,romanized:pud,IPA:[put], plural:pudi orpudy) is a unit ofmass equal to 40funt (фунт,Russian pound). Since 1899 it is set to approximately 16.38kilograms (36.11pounds).[1] It was used inRussia,Belarus, andUkraine.Pood was first mentioned in a number of 12th-century documents. Unlikefunt, which came at least in the 14th century fromMiddle High German:phunt,Old East Slavic:пудъpud (formerly written *пѫдъpǫdŭ) is a much older borrowing from Late Latin "pondo", from Classical "pondus".
Together with other units ofweight of theImperial Russian weight measurement system, the USSR officially abolished thepood in 1924. The term remained in widespread use until at least the 1940s.[2] In his 1953 short story "Matryona's Place",Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn presents thepood 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 Russiankettlebells, cast in multiples and fractions of 16 kg (which ispood rounded to metric units). For example, a 24 kg kettlebell is commonly referred to as "one-and-halfpood kettlebell" (polutorapudovaya girya). 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 apood of salt with him." (Russian:Человека узнаешь, когда с ним пуд соли съешь.)
In modern colloquial Russian, the expressionsto pudov (сто пудов) – 'a hundredpoods,' 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"[3] has almost supplanted its original meaning of "very heavy weight." The adjectivestopudovy and the adverbstopudovo are also used to convey the same sense of certainty.
The word is also used inPolish idiomatically or as a proverb (with the original/strict meaning commonly forgotten):nudy na pudy (Polish for 'unsupportable boredoms', literally 'boredoms [that could be measured] inpoods')