Why the US Still Uses Fahrenheit While Most of the World Uses Celsius
The US continued using Fahrenheit (adopted before Celsius became the international standard) largely for the same historical reasons it retained imperial units generally — Fahrenheit was already deeply embedded in weather reporting, medicine, and everyday habit by the time metric conversion efforts gained traction, and a full switch never happened.
This mirrors the broader imperial-vs-metric pattern covered in the unit conversion guide, applied specifically to temperature.
The historical adoption timeline
Fahrenheit was developed in the early 18th century and became the standard scale used in the US well before Celsius (developed later) became the internationally preferred standard — by the time global metric adoption accelerated, Fahrenheit was already the deeply entrenched default across US weather reporting, cooking, and everyday temperature discussion.
Where Celsius is actually used within the US
Scientific, medical, and technical contexts within the US commonly use Celsius (and Kelvin, for scientific work), consistent with international standards in those fields — it's specifically everyday, general-public contexts (weather, home thermostats, cooking) that remain predominantly Fahrenheit.
Why the two scales feel intuitively different
Fahrenheit's finer degree intervals (a Fahrenheit degree is a smaller unit than a Celsius degree) were historically seen as advantageous for describing everyday weather without needing decimals — a matter of practical convenience and long-standing habit rather than either scale being more scientifically valid than the other.