Glossary

British Standard Pipe

British Standard Pipe (BSP) technical standards for screw threads that has been adopted internationally for interconnecting and sealing pipes and fittings by mating an external (male) thread with an internal (female) thread. It has been adopted as standard in plumbing and pipe fitting, except in North America, where NPT and related threads are used.

Jointing threads

These are pipe threads where pressure-tightness is made through the mating of two threads together. They always use a taper male thread, but can have either parallel or taper female threads. (In Europe, taper female pipe threads are not commonly used.)

Longscrew threads

These are parallel pipe threads used where a pressure-tight joint is achieved by the compression of a soft material (such as an o-ring seal or a washer) between the end face of the male thread and a socket or nipple face, with the tightening of a backnut.

Pipe thread sizes

At least 41 thread sizes have been defined, ranging from 1⁄16 to 18, although of these only 15 are included in ISO 7 and 24 in ISO 228.[3][4][5][6] The size number was originally based on the inner diameter (measured in inches) of a steel tube for which the thread was intended, but contemporary pipes tend to use thinner walls to save material, and thus have an inner diameter larger than this nominal size. In the modern standard metric version, it is simply a size number, where listed diameter size is the major outer diameter of the external thread. For a taper thread, it is the diameter at the "gauge length" (plus/minus one thread pitch) from the small end of the thread. The taper is 1:16, meaning that for each 16 units of measurement increase in the distance from the end, the diameter increases by 1 unit of measurement.

Pipe and fastener dimensions