The concept of gallon can come from two different etymological sources: the French gallon or the English gallon . In each case, the root gives rise to different meanings.
When gallon comes from the French language, it can refer to a fabric that is used as a ribbon. A chevron, in this framework, is a badge used by members of a military force.
As a fabric, chevron stands out for its strength. It can be made with silver and gold thread, silk or wool, and used for ornamental purposes. At the level of the armed forces, chevrons serve to display a grade or rank .
If gallon comes from the English language, however, it refers to a unit of volume used in English-speaking nations and in several Latin American countries (such as Nicaragua and Panama , among others). The gallon refers to the volume of a liquid, usually fuel, wine or beer.
According to the details of the dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ), in North America a gallon is equivalent to 3.785 liters . In Great Britain , however, a gallon is equivalent to 4.546 liters . In this way you can differentiate between the international gallon (or US gallon ) and the imperial gallon (or British gallon ).
It is evident that talking about gallons in general is confusing, since depending on the region the expression refers to different types of volumes. A gallon of gasoline in the United States does not have the same volume as a gallon of beer in England , for example. That is why it is important to know, in each case, its equivalence in a common unit (such as the liter ).
If this difference in meaning can cause confusion for us, who speak another language and if we traveled to one of these two regions we would not carry so many preconceptions, let's imagine how much more difficult it is for an Englishman to adapt to the equivalence of a gallon in North America and vice versa. . It is even more interesting that in our language we have a word with two very different meanings, each one with its own origin .
It is worth mentioning that not only English-speaking countries use the term gallon to refer to the aforementioned volume unit, but we can also find it in those that are influenced by them, such as the following: Nicaragua, Panama, Liberia, Honduras , Colombia, El Salvador and Guatemala. In all of them, the most normal use of this word is reserved for the measurement of volume of certain liquids, especially gasoline, necessary to express its price .
As a curious fact, we must indicate that in ancient times it was not enough to know the number of gallons of a certain product to know what quantity it was, since for each one the values were different, and the place where it was taken also influenced the measure. By the 19th century, two definitions became widespread: the British beer gallon and the wine gallon.
The concept of the imperial gallon arose in Great Britain in 1824 from the one used to measure beer at that time, and was based on the amount of 10 pounds of distilled water calculated in air, with a value of 30 inches. of mercury barometric pressure and a temperature of 16,667 degrees Celsius. Expressed in cubic inches, the volume of the imperial gallon is equal to 277.41945; In cubic centimeters, on the other hand, it results in a total of 4546.0903.
In the United States they had already assigned another value to the gallon unit, which was based on measuring wine in a cylinder 7 inches in diameter and 6 inches long. While at that time the American gallon was equivalent to 230,907 cubic inches, today its value is 231.