Paper used in furniture design. Watercolor paper has a long history of production and use. The thickness of paper is often measured by caliper, which is typically given in thousandths of an inch in the United States and in micrometers (µm) in the rest of the world. Paper may be between thick. Paper is often characterized by weight. In the United States, the weight assigned to a paper is the weight of a ream, 500 sheets, of varying "basic sizes", before the paper is cut into the size it is sold to end customers. For example, a ream of 20 lb,
Paper size a number of different sizes were defined for large sheets of paper, and paper sizes were defined by the sheet name and the number of times it had been folded. Thus a full sheet of "royal" paper was 25 × 20 inches, and "royal octavo" was this size folded three times, so as to make eight sheets, and was thus 10 × inches. Imperial sizes were used in the United Kingdom and its territories. These sizes are no longer commonly used since the UK switched to ISO sizes. Many of these sizes were only used for making books (see bookbinding),