Although the 1985 Weights and Measures Act[3] expressly prohibited the use of the stone as a unit of measure for purposes of trade (other than as a supplementary unit), the stone remains widely used within the British Isles as a means of expressing human body weight. People in these countries normally describe themselves as weighing, for example, "11 stone 4" (11 stone and 4 pounds), rather than "72 kilograms" in most other countries, or "158 pounds" (the conventional way of expressing the same weight in the United States). Its widespread colloquial use may be compared to the persistence in the British Isles of other Imperial units like the foot, the inch, and the mile, despite these having been supplanted entirely or partly by metric units in official use and other contexts. Road distances and speed enforcement area are still expressed officially in yards, miles and miles per hour in the United Kingdom. Both Canada and the Republic of Ireland now use the metric system. In official use, provision is usually made for the public to express body weight in either stones or kilograms (similar allowance is made for measuring height in feet and inches). For example, on a National Health Service Web site, both metric and Imperial units are used.[4]

Outside the British Isles, stone may also be used to express body weight in casual contexts in other Commonwealth countries.