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A metre-stick, metrestick (or meter-stick and meterstick as alternative spellings);[1] or yardstick[2] is either a straightedge or foldable ruler used to measure length, and is especially common in the construction industry. They are often made of wood or plastic, and often have metal or plastic joints so that they can be folded together. The normal length of a metre-stick made for the international market is either one or two metres, while a yardstick made for the U.S. market is typically one yard (3 feet or 0.9144 metres) long.
Metre-sticks are usually divided with lines for each millimetre (1000 per metre) and numerical markings per centimetre (100 per metre), with numbers either in centimetres or millimetres. Yardsticks are most often marked with a scale in inches, but sometimes also feature marks for foot increments. Hybrid sticks with more than one measurement system also exist, most notably those which have metric measurements on one side and U.S. customary units on the other side (or both on the same side). The "tumstock" (literally "thumbstick", meaning "inch-stick") invented in 1883 by the Swedish engineer Karl-Hilmer Johansson Kollén was the first such hybrid stick,[citation needed] and was developed to help Sweden convert to the metric system.