Peck (pk)

A traditional dry volume market unit equal to 2 gallons for orchard fruits.

Two gallons of dry goods, a quarter of a bushel, and the measure at which the grain trade met the retail customer. A peck was a basket you could carry, which is why it served orchards and market gardens as much as corn: apples, pears, potatoes and onions were all sold by the peck at market. The unit survives in speech more than in commerce, chiefly in a peck of trouble and in the tongue-twister about Peter Piper’s pickled peppers, which is a nonsense precisely because peppers were never sold that way. The word arrived in English from Anglo-Norman around the thirteenth century, and like most dry measures it was checked against a stamped standard held by the local authority, since short measure in a peck of apples was as prosecutable as short measure in anything else.