yardstick

The explosion happens very quickly — too fast to mark its height accurately on a wall or yardstick.

Body count has long been the yardstick by which we measure calamity.

When decisions had to be taken, she attempted to guess what Albert would have done and used this as her yardstick.

The yardstick, in other words, is not how a Palestinian group treats its own people but how it treats Israel.

Like continuity, it provides a yardstick against which we can measure ourselves.

That sense of sustained struggle provides the yardstick for judging Obama.

“$40 million, $50 million a year is excessive, no matter what the yardstick,” he says.

It's a musty old tradition, a sort of a remnant of the old days, that present day newsmongers use as a yardstick for comparisons.

The cutaway is made of a small piece of board, a cigar-box lid, an old yardstick or a piece of lath, which should be about 6 in.

They've got as many virtues as any Englisher that ever snivelled prayer and shortened yardstick.

I know I can squeal just like a rubber doll; but s'posin' they should let me fall off the yardstick—where'd I go to then?

The yardstick, the half bushel, and the coining of money are all devices to facilitate exchanges.