The rod is a unit of length in the imperial and US sytem and uses the symbol rod.
A rod (or perch, pole, lug) is equal to 16.5 feet or 5.5 yards.
It is a building surveyor's tool for measuring distance and is particularly useful as multiples of this unit can make up an exact acre. A perfect acre is a rectangle with edges 660 feet and 66 feet - which is 40 rods by 4 rods; i.e. 1 acre = 160 square rods.
The pica is a unit of length in the field of typography and uses the symbol pc.
There are 12 points in 1 pica. 1 pica represents approximately 1/6 of an inch.
Picas are expressed using numbers and a lower case p on software such as Adobe InDesign - for example 8p6 which would represent 8 picas and 6 points (or 8.5 picas).
The Pica is very useful in measuring and calculating the space needed to print letters and words on paper - for example when laying out books or magazine articles; the font lengths are quanitified by the number of characters per pica (cpp).