fahrenheit

Fahrenheit is a temperature scale created by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a physicist and instrument maker who lived in the Dutch Republic in the early 18th century. He proposed the Fahrenheit scale in 1724. The scale uses 32 degrees Fahrenheit as the freezing point of water and 212 degrees Fahrenheit as the boiling point of water at standard atmospheric pressure, a span of 180 evenly spaced degrees between these two fixed points. Each Fahrenheit degree is 5/9 of a Celsius degree.

Fahrenheit's scale was designed for practical measurement with mercury and alcohol thermometers, and it became widely adopted in the English-speaking world. Today, Fahrenheit remains the customary temperature scale in the United States and a few other places, particularly for everyday weather forecasts, cooking, and some industrial applications. In scientific contexts, Celsius and Kelvin are generally preferred, and many technical fields use SI units.

The name Fahrenheit is also encountered in popular culture, notably in Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, a work of dystopian fiction published in 1953, whose title references the temperature scale rather than a scientific concept.