pound (thing)

Also a generic measurement term for the weight of paper (used in the United States) that is actually completely and utterly meaningless without a specification for what kind of paper is being referred to. It is the weight (in pounds) of a ream of paper, except that there is (was) a strange standard of what size the sheets of paper in said ream are that relates to how it was convenient to fold the different types of paper.

If you can help it, I suggest using gsm instead of "pounds" to measure the weight of paper because this particular way of measuring the weight of paper was actually invented by insane englishmen that had spent too much time sniffing glue used in book bindings.

The general kinds of pound measurements for paper are:

• pound book paper (the most common if the paper's being processed by a professional print shop)
• pound tag paper
• pound cover paper
• pound index paper
• pound bond paper (the most common if the paper's going into a printer or copier)
• pound blotting paper
• pound blanks paper
• pound postcard paper (same as pound bristol paper -- common weight measurement for cards such as postcards and business cards)
• pound box board

(Credit to Adrian Mariano, author of the GNU units program, where I got much of this information.)

100 gsm ~= 68 pound book (offset) paper ~= 61 pound tag paper ~= 36 pound cover paper ~= 55 pound index paper ~= 27 pound bond paper ~= 32 pound blotting paper ~= 44 pound blanks paper ~= 46 pound postcard paper ~= 20 pound box board ~= a good choice for printing your resume on.