The yard is a unit of length in the imperial and US system and uses the symbol yd.
A yard is equal to 3 ft or 36 inches. There is 0.9144 m in a yard. There are 1760 yards in a mile.
Derived from the Old English 'gyrd' or 'gerd', the yard was first defined in the late 1600s laws of Ine of Wessex where a "yard of land" (yardland) was an old unit of tax assessment by the government.
The yard was the original standard adpoted by early English leaders and was apparently used in length by the Saxon race and represented the breadth of the chest of a man. After a relative hiatus, Queen Elizabeth reintroduced the yard as the English standard of measure, and it still survives in many 2nd generation conversations today.
The ell is a unit of length and originates from historic England and uses the symbol ell.
The ell usually measured 45in or 1.143m but was origally a "cubit" - which was the length from your elbow to the tip of your fingers and literally translated from the word "arm". It was mostly used in the tailoring world when buying and selling textiles.
Although now obsolete, the word "ell" still survives in the English word "elbow".