I mentioned this in a comment in my main journal, but I figure it's worth recording here as well.<\/p>\n
The Clancy Brothers recorded an Ewan MacColl song, \"Shoals of Herring,\" on their album The Boys Won't Leave the Girls Alone<\/cite>. There's a line in the song that I always heard as \"with a hundred grand of the silver darlings\" (meaning a hundred thousand). But the version of the lyrics posted at Cantaria<\/a> has it as \"a hundred cran.\"<\/p>\n At first I figured that must be a misprint; MW3 doesn't list the word \"cran.\" But I checked OneLook Dictionary Search<\/a>, and discovered that \"cran<\/a>\" is the standard unit of measure for fresh-caught herring, about 45 gallons.<\/p>\n But how many herring is that? Luckily, itymbi<\/a> foresaw that we might want to know, and gave an answer a couple years ago. It pointed to the cran<\/a> page at the very useful (and previously unknown to me) sizes.com, which tells us that a cran can vary from 700 to 2500 herring, but averages around 1200.<\/p>\n So actually, a hundred cran is probably significantly more than a hundred grand of herring.<\/p>\n The sizes.com page also clarifies that it's 45 wine<\/em> gallons, equal to 37.5 imperial gallons.<\/p>\n Side note: In some sense, this doesn't fit my usual criterion of being a word that I haven't heard before; I've been hearing it since I was a kid. Except I didn't know I'd been hearing it 'til last night, so I figure that's close enough.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I mentioned this in a comment in my main journal, but I figure it’s worth recording here as well. The Clancy Brothers recorded an Ewan MacColl song, “Shoals of Herring,”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-to-me-words"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3682\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}