Pica is a measurement used in the printing industry.  One pica is
equal to 1/6th of an inch.  What is the origin of the measurement, why
1/6th of an inch, and why the name pica?  Who came up with it, and
what country did it come from?  Is it generally pronounced pee-ka or
pie-ka?  The more details the better!

Greetings!  What an interesting question!

The origin of the name I found explained as "the English 'pica' comes
from the Latin pica (magpie) since the first printed book used clearly
distinguished blacks and whites, like the plumage of the magpie bird."
 This comes from a in-depth explanation, including mathematical
equations, titled "Truchet & Types - Truchet and the typographic
point" which explains early printing history in France.

The beginnings of the pica were French but there is also an American
pica history, and a point used in America is smaller than that used in
Europe.  The pronounciation "pie-ka" is the one listed in my
dictionary.  It appears Fournier coined the term.

From the article "Why Windows pages have tiny text," I found:

"The first modern point system was published in 1737 by Pierre
Fournier, who used a 12-point unit he called a cicero that was 0.1648
inches. Thus, a point would be a unit of length equal to 0.0137
inches. By 1770, Francois Ambriose Didot converted Fournier's system
to sync with the legal French foot of the time, creating a larger
0.1776-inch pica, with 12 points each measuring 0.0148 inches. As fate
would have it, the French converted to the metric system by the end of
the 18th century, but Didot's system was influential and is still
widely used in Europe. In Didot's system, a pica is larger than
one-sixth of an inch, and thus his point - still called the Didot
point - is larger than 1/72 of an inch.

The U.S., of course, did its own thing. In 1879 the U.S. began
adopting a system developed by Nelson Hawks, who believed the idea of
a point system was his and his alone. Claims of originality aside,
Hawks' system came to dominate American publishing within a decade,
and today an American pica measures 0.1660 inches, just under one
sixth of an inch, and a point (often called a pica point) is 0.0138
inches, very close to Fournier's original value, but still a tiny bit
less than 1/72 of an inch.

Also in 1879, Hermann Berthold converted Didot's point system to
metric, and the Didot-Berthold system is still used in Germany,
Russia, and eastern Europe. Just to make things more confusing, many
Europeans measure type directly in millimeters, bypassing the point
altogether.

The term pica may confuse readers old enough to remember typewriters
and daisy wheel printers. Those technologies describe type in terms of
pitch, or how many characters fit into a horizontal inch. Pica type
corresponded to 10 characters per inch, elite to 12 characters per
inch, and micro-elite to 15 characters per inch. These days, you'd
simulate these pitches using a monospaced font (like Courier) at 12,
10, and 8 points, respectively."


I used the search term "invention of pica" on Google to find the
Truchet story.  Then, I searched "Fournier pica" to find the Windows
article.  I took the term "Nelson Hawks pica" and searched that on
Google to find the history of the American point system. Then, I
searched "Ambrose Didot pica" to find his story.

 
Truchet & Types
http://www.irisa.fr/faqtypo/truchet/truchet1E.html

Fournier Pica
http://www2.cea.edu/robert/windows.tinytext.html

Nelson Hawks pica
http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/fabian-point.html

Ambrose Didot pica
http://www.vakcer.com/oberon/dtp/fonts/point.htm


I hope this information is of assistance.  I certainly learned a great
deal from your question!

---

Clarification of Answer by journalist-ga on 20 Jul 2002 10:22 PDT

Greetings and thank you for your four-star rating of my research. 
Should you ever require assistance on other research matters, feel
free to request my services.

.
Merriam-Webster OnLine gives the following two definitions of this
word:

Main Entry: 1 piˇca 
Pronunciation: 'pI-k&
Function: noun
Etymology: New Latin, from Latin, magpie -- more at PIE
Date: 1563
: an abnormal desire to eat substances (as chalk or ashes) not
normally eaten

Main Entry: 2 pica
Function: noun
Etymology: probably from Medieval Latin, collection of church rules
Date: 1588
1 : 12-point type
2 : a unit of about 1/6 inch used in measuring typographic material
3 : a typewriter type providing 10 characters to the linear inch and
six lines to the vertical inch

The first entry not only gives the pronunciation, it also includes a
sound file of it. The second entry gives no pronunciation help, which
would mean it's pronounced the same.

Go to http://www.m-w.com/ , then input the word in the search box.

=====

Here's a bit of history on point size, as well as an official
definition of pica as a measurement.

THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL IS QUOTED FROM THE WEB SITE:

Character sizes of printed fonts are normally measured in points.
You'll see references that say a point is 1/72" and others that say
1/72" is only an approximation. According to the comp.fonts FAQ, in
pre-revolutionary France a point was 1/72 of an inch -- of a French
inch, which was bigger than an English inch. Among the changes that
flowed from the French Revolution was a change in units of measure (do
you recall the origins of the metric system?). The FAQ says that in
1886, the U.S. Typefounders Association standardized an American point
as 1/12 of a pica and defined pica by saying that 83 of them equaled
35 centimeters. (The calculator on my PC says that gives 72.2811....
points per inch.) From somewhere else there is a "definition" of 72.27
points per inch. PostScript (Adobe's page description language used,
for example, in many laser printers) defined a point as 1/72" for
simplicity, and this usage is very common. Since you'll probably never
try to calculate an exact distance from point sizes -- you'll probably
use it as an independent scale that lets you pick a size.

http://www.cs.appstate.edu/~egp/1410_archive/Word97/wrd_p2a.html

=====

The Wordsmyth site gives the following pronunciation and definitions:

Part of Speech   noun 
Pronunciation   pai kE 

Definition 1. a printing type measuring about one sixth of an inch, or
an equivalent linear measurement used to determine the dimensions of
printed lines, illustrations, or the like.

Definition 2. a type size for typewriters that allows ten characters
to the inch. (Cf. elite.)

http://www.wordsmyth.net

=====

The Foam Train Foundry glossary gives this definition:

pica
A unit of measure equal to 12 points. Two different picas are in
common use. (1) In traditional printers' measure, the pica is 4.22 mm
or 0.166 inch: close to, but not exactly, one sixth of an inch. This
is the customary British and American unit of measuring the length of
the line and the depth of the typeblock. (2) The PostScript pica is
precisely one sixth of an inch. (Note: the continental European
counterpart to the pica is the cicero, which is 7% larger.)

http://www.owlsoup.com/foamtrain/glossary/ppp.html

=====

A web page on Sébastien Truchet (born in 1657) and his impact on
printing titled "Truchet & Types: Truchet and the typographic point"
gives a bit of insight into the naming of fonts and such. The origin
for pica according to this site is this: "'pica' comes from the Latin
pica (magpie) since the first printed book used clearly distinguished
blacks and whites, like the plumage of the magpie bird."

THE FOLLOWING MATERIAL IS QUOTED FROM THE WEB SITE:

At the end of the 17th century, body sizes were not measured but were
given names instead (just as today's bold typefaces are referred to as
"heavy", "light", or "demi bold" without being really measured). These
names were often based on the title of books in which the characters
were used for the first time. For example, "Cicero"was the name given
to the body sizes of characters used to print Cicero's Epistles while
the characters in the book "City of God", written by the father of the
Church, were known as "Saint Augustin". They could also derive from
their appearance: the English "pica" comes from the Latin pica
(magpie) since the first printed book used clearly distinguished
blacks and whites, like the plumage of the magpie bird. Other names
stem from the origin of the characters (e.g. "Parisienne"), their
function (the French "Canon", English "brevier" or German "Missal");
or from their relative size ("Petit Romain", "Gros-Canon") since there
was an implicit scale between these sizes (a "little Canon", for
example, was twice as large as a "Saint Augustin"). However, sizes
differed widely from one foundry to another and it was very difficult
to mix types produced by different foundries or even by a single
foundry for that matter.

http://www.irisa.fr/faqtypo/truchet/truchet1E.html

=====

Hope that helped some!

TexasT
.