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It blows our hivemind that the United States doesn't use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).
Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America's little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:
The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram
[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]
ISO 216 A series papers formats
AO
A1
A3
A5
A7
A6
Et.
A4
Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. We're not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog.
Wait, the US genuinely doesn't use A4 etc.?
Letter paper (8.5" x 11" | 215.9mm x 279.4mm) is kinda sorta pretty close to A4 (8.27" x 11.69" | 210mm x 297mm) so without having the two next to each other, it can seem like A4 is just a funny piece of letter, and vice versa. But to answer the actual question, USA and Canada (and apparently the phillipines???) use the "North American Standard" which is a terrifying mess in comparison to the beauty that is the ISO standard.
Edit: typos
Philippines makes sense, being a former US colony
The US is a former British colony, but it doesn't stop them from doing whatever the hell they want. Utter lunatics...
I'm sorry, I still haven't forgiven them for the whole tea thing...
We wanted to make sure it was as salty as King George III.
America tried to modernise many British means of methods and standards. They used a metric currency long before Britain. That’s why they have a cent (1/100) rather than pennies and bobs and truppence.
They got ride of many terms for multiples of measurements that made the imperial system more similar to metric. Americans use ounces, but they don’t use pounds.
America also defines their us customary units using metric. There’s no longer an inch. There is a meter and from that an inch is defined as 24 millimeters. This is largely due to British, Canadian and American components for fighting wars not fitting together despite all using the same inch.
Had America modernised a little later they probably would have converted to metric earlier than Britain.