I recently saw a paper crafts video on YouTube by an English woman. At one point she pulled out a ruler to measure something. It appeared to be an older ruler, wooden, with the sort of shininess from wear you'd expect of a wooden object that was 40–50 years old, maybe more. It had inch markings. This didn't surprise me too much, as lots of paper craft things are based on inch measurements, and it's a lot easier to make something match 5" than to make it match 12.7cm.

Still, something about it seemed odd and it took me a second to realize it was dividing its inches into tenths. Now, I have some decimal inch rulers, but they are for specific purposes (drafting and machining) and this ruler had the appearance of a household ruler.

This feels bizarre to me as an American. Almost the entire reason for using inches over centimeters is because you have a visceral understanding of it, but few people would have a visceral understanding of 2.3 inches.

So, is it common to have a ruler in inches? If you did have one, maybe from the pre-metrication era, would it be common to have the inches divided into tenths?