Bradford Count

The Bradford Count, also known as the English Worsted Yarn Count System or Spinning Count, is a traditional British method of assessing the fineness or fibre diameter of wool. It is named after the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire.

To measure the fineness of sheep wool fibre before microscopes and lasers were used, English wool handlers in the city of Bradford described wool by estimating (with experienced eyes) how many 560 yd hanks of single-strand yarn could be made by a good spinner from a pound (0.436 kg) of "top" (cleaned combed wool with the fibres all parallel). The finer the wool, the more hanks could be spun: from a pound of "62s," for example, sixty-two such hanks could be made. Bradford Count values usually vary between 28s for coarse wools to 70s for very fine ones. A table of equivalences with the modern system of measuring diameters in microns was published by the International Wool Secretariat in 1970 or 1990:

The Bradford System is widely used among shepherds and breed associations. In 1968, the United States Department of Agriculture issued official standards (for the U.S. only, not applicable worldwide) which assigned ranges of average fibre diameter (AFD) and maximum standard deviation to each of the Bradford counts. For example, wool with average fibre diameter in micrometres from 28.60 to 30.09 was to be called "54s."

A spinning count is defined as the number of hanks of yarn that can be spun from a pound of wool. A hank of wool is 560 yards long (560 yd/lb = 1.129 km/kg). In theory a pound of 62s wool could produce 34720 yards of yarn. As it has become easier to measure the average fibre diameter and distribution, spinning count is being replaced with the specification of average fibre diameter in micrometers and fiber distribution in standard deviations.