Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Any of various units of weight used in eastern Asia, roughly equivalent to 38 grams (1 1/3 ounces).
- n. A monetary unit formerly used in China, equivalent in value to this weight of standard silver.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The Chinese liang or ounce, equal to 1⅛ ounces avoirdupois. See liang.
- n. A liang or ounce of “sycee,” or fine uncoined silver: the unit of monetary reckoning in China. The tael is a money of account (not a coin), and is divided into 10 mace, or 100 candareens. Its value varies with the fluctuations in the price of silver bullion. At present (1891) it is equal to about $1.05 United States gold. One thousand Mexican dollars equal 720 taels. See liang, mace, and candareen.
Wiktionary
- n. Any of several units of measure used in China and elsewhere in eastern Asia, approximately 40 grams.
- n. Any of several monetary units equal to the equivalent weight in silver.
- n. Hong Kong leung, a traditional unit of weight, in modern usage legally defined as 1/16 of a catty or kan (斤) or 0.0377993638 kilograms
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. A denomination of money, in China, worth nearly six shillings sterling, or about a dollar and forty cents; also, a weight of one ounce and a third.
WordNet 3.0
- n. a unit of weight used in east Asia approximately equal to 1.3 ounces
Etymologies
- From Portuguese tael, from Malay tahil. (Wiktionary)
- Portuguese, from Malay tahil, tael. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Therefore to convert Lanchow cash into Tientsin cash you must divide the Lanchow cash by 3, count 975 as 1000, and consider this equal to a certain percentage of a theoretical amount of silver known as a tael, which is always varying of itself as well as by the fluctuations in the market value of silver, and which is not alike in any two places, and may widely vary in different portions of the same place.”
“Scrap refiners, known as fabricators, were then charging $5-$10 per Chinese tael, which is comparable to an ounce.”
“Silver, measured out in a unit called a tael, each equivalent to a thousand coppers, was the trading medium of the powerful hong merchants of Canton.”
“The tael is a weight of silver which varies considerably in value; in 1906 the Haikwan tael, in which the custom revenues and all values are given, was equivalent to 2.46 Indian rupees, 1.60 Japanese yen, Mexican $1.54, English 3s 3 1/2d.,”
“[26] The tael is a Chinese money of account, worth formerly about”
“But one meets persistently the word "tael" in their estimate of the value of things.”
“Besides, the saving of a tael is a small matter. ”
Hung Lou Meng, Book II Or, the Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese Novel in Two Books
“Gold reached a record of 33 million dong ($1,693) per tael Wednesday, about $1,405 a troy ounce.”
The Wall Street Journal: Vietnam Considers Allowing Gold Imports
“June 17, 2010 at 2:23 am blinks… otai… ai kan libs wif dat *snugglols bebbehkjuteh* awwee… lokkit dis tael… an dem pawsis… ai fink eet gottit eben kjutur bai cloenin… fank ju mmm”
Video: Kitteh Freaks Himself Out - Lolcats 'n' Funny Pictures of Cats - I Can Has Cheezburger?
“He mentioned that in the Kunming area eight taels of silver equaled one tael of gold. 14 In the Gold Teeth area where gold was relatively abundant, five taels of silver were exchanged for one tael of gold.”
Between Winds and Clouds: The Making of Yunnan (Second Century BCE to Twentieth Century CE)
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘tael’.
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Really Cool Four-Letter Words
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words
diplopic, dolorous, farrago, surety, scuttlebutt, Arabesque, infarct, neurasthenia, lambent, expurge, univocal, simper and 395 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for tael.
chained_bear For usage note see johannes. Mar 4, 2008