Gowpen

The hollow formed by two cupped hands, and the quantity they will hold.

The gowpen belongs to the oldest family of measures there is: the ones defined by the body rather than by a vessel. The word is well recorded in Scots and Ulster-Scots, and it means both the cupped hands themselves and what they hold, in the same way that a handful means both. What is less well recorded is its use as a working measure. A correspondent from County Down describes it as the standard unit for feeding livestock within living memory — a gowpen of feed scooped from the bin for each calf in the pen — which is the sort of trade convention that was universally understood and never written down. Spellings vary: gowpen, gowpin, gopen. The quantity varies too, since hands do, which is rather the point of a unit nobody expected to be exact.