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 parsec is a unit of length and is used in the Astronomical system of units. It is denoted by the symbol pc.
It is equal to 3.26156 ly (light years) which is approximately 31 trillion kilometres (19 trillion miles). It's used to measure huge distances to objects and planets outside of our Solar System.
It was first brought into use by Herbert Hall Turner (a British Astronomer) in 1913 and was invented to use in calculations of astronomical distances to make it easier in calculations using raw data.