Emily Dickinson Lexicon

FOTH'ER, n. [G. fuder, a tun or load; D. voeder; Sax. fother, food, fodder, and a mass of lead, from the sense of stuffing, crowding. See Food.]

A weight of lead consisting eight pigs, and every pig twenty one stone and a half. But the fother is of different weights. With the plumbers in London it is nineteen hundred and a half, and at the mines it is twenty-two hundred and a half. Encyc.