Can someone explain the thickness of pencils e.g. what does 6B mean?

Many pencils across the world and almost all in Europe are graded on the European system using a continuüm from "H" (for hardness) to "B" (for blackness), as well as "F" (for fine point). The standard writing pencil is graded HB. According to Petrosky this system might have been developed in the early 1900s by Brookman (an English pencil maker) which used "B" for black and "H" for hard; a pencil's grade was described by a sequence or successive Hs or Bs such as BB and BBB for successively softer leads, and HH and HHH for successively harder ones.

Today a set of pencils ranging from a very hard, light-marking pencil to a very soft, black-marking pencil usually ranges from hardest to softest as follows

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