Barrel

Barrel

A barrel, cask, or tun is a hollow cylindrical container, traditionally made of wooden staves bound by wooden or metal hoops. Traditionally, the barrel was a standard size of measure referring to a set capacity or weight of a given commodity. For example, in the UK a barrel of beer refers to a quantity of 36 imperial gallons. Wine was shipped in barrels of 119 litres (31 US gal). A small barrel is called a keg.

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Famous quotes containing the word barrel:

    My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
    Toward heaven still,
    And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
    Beside it, and there may be two or three
    Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
    But I am done with apple-picking now.
    Robert Frost (1874–1963)

    Peaches grow wild, and pigs can live in clover;
    A barrel of salted herrings lasts a year;
    The spring begins before the winter’s over.
    Elinor Wylie (1885–1928)

    I do not know if you remember the tale of the girl who saves the ship under mutiny by sitting on the powder barrel with her lighted torch ... and all the time knowing that it is empty? This has seemed to me a charming image of the women of my time. There they were, keeping the world in order ... by sitting on the mystery of life, and knowing themselves that there was no mystery.
    Isak Dinesen [Karen Blixen] (1885–1962)