The quintal or centner is a historical unit of mass in many countries which is usually defined as 100 base units, such as pounds or kilograms. It is a traditional unit of weight in France, Portugal, and Spain and their former colonies. It is commonly used for grain prices in wholesale markets in Ethiopia and India, where 1 quintal = 100 kg. In British English, it referred to the hundredweight; in American English, it formerly referred to an uncommon measure of 100 kilograms. Languages drawing its cognate name for the weight from Romance languages include French, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish , Italian , Esperanto , Polish . Languages taking their cognates from Germanicized centner include the German , Lithuanian , Swedish , Polish , Russian and Ukrainian (), Estonian and Spanish . Many European languages have come to translate both the imperial and American hundredweight as their cognate form of quintal or centner. Name The concept has resulted in two different series of masses: Those based on the local pound (which after metrication was considered equivalent to half a kilogram), and those uprated to being based on the kilogram. In Albania (), Ethiopia (kuntal), and India, the 100 kilogram definition may have been introduced via Islamic trade. It is a standard measurement of mass for agricultural products in those countries. In France it used to be defined as 100 (pounds), about 48.95 kg, and has been redefined as 100 kg (), thus called metric quintal with symbol qq. In Spain, the is still defined as 100 , or about 46 kg, but the metric quintal is also defined as 100 kg; In Portugal a quintal is 128 or about 58.75 kg. The German and the Danish are pound-based, and thus since metrication are defined as 50 kg, whereas the Austrian and Swiss since metrication has been re-defined as 100 kg. In Germany a measure of 100 kg is named a . Common agricultural units used in the Soviet Union were the 100-kilogram () and the term "centner per hectare". These are still used by countries that were part of the Soviet Union. English use In English both terms quintal and centner were once alternative names for the hundredweight and thus defined either as 100 lb (exactly ) or as . Also, in the Dominican Republic it is about . The German was introduced to the English language via Hanseatic trade