Hand (unit) inches for the handsbreadth; Mortimer gives the same, three inches for the Hand's-breadth, and four for the "Handful, or simply, Hand", but adds "The hand among horse-dealers, &c. is four-fingers' breadth, being the fist clenched, whereby the height of a horse is measured", thus equating "hand" with both the palm and the fist. Similarly, Wright's 1831 translation of Buffon mentions "A hand breadth (palmus), the breadth of the four fingers of the hand, or three inches", but the "Encyclopædia Perthensis" of 1816 gives under Palm (4): "A hand, or measure of lengths comprising three inches". Today the hand is used
Length of a module Length of a module In abstract algebra, the length of a module is a measure of the module's "size". It is defined to be the length of the longest chain of submodules and is a generalization of the concept of dimension for vector spaces. Modules with "finite" length share many important properties with finite-dimensional vector spaces. Other concepts used to 'count' in ring and module theory are depth and height; these are both somewhat more subtle to define. There are also various ideas of "dimension" that are useful. Finite length commutative rings play an essential role in functorial treatments of