Measurement Words
The need for regular means to measure weight and distance has been with societies for millennia. Having a standard for these is useful in science and technology, but most of all trade. Knowing how much of a product you're receiving or how far away something is is invaluable to people. Moreover, this has to be agreed upon across cultures, societies, and languages. This makes words related to measurement an area that's full of cognate words that are often recognizable across the world.
Gram, Meters, Liters
Aside from a few stubborn holdouts, the metric system has more or less conquered the world as the de facto way to measure weight, volume, and length. Even in the US, rulers usually put inches on one side and centimeters on the other. And that’s the point of the metric system, to have a unified standard to facilitate science, study, and of course trade. And because it’s so widespread, a large part of the metric system has cognate words in languages around the world.
We can find terms from the metric system like gram, meter, and liter in a staggering number of languages.
You could say that the words gram, meter, and liter make up the base of the metric system which then have prefixes like kilo- milli- and nano- attached to them. Like the base words, most of these prefixes come from Greek. These forms with these Greek prefixes are also often borrowed wholesale rather than adding native number prefixes onto the base words. As such, there are consistent cognates with kilogram, centimeter, and deciliter as well.
One interesting exception is in Modern Greek with any word that has the prefix milli-. The mill- prefix comes from Latin which gave English words like millipede (thousand legs) and millennium (thousand years). So for words like milliliter and milligram, Modern Greek uses the native prefix for 1,000 chilio-
English Greek Transcribed Greek
milligram χιλιοστόγραμμο (chiliostógrammo)
millimeter χιλιοστόμετρο (chiliostómetro)
This means that morphemes and word parts like mili- kilo- nano- and deca- have become integrated into a huge number of languages. Among many of these, the more common prefixes like mili- and kilo- have become productive in their own right in many languages.
Other Standard Units (SI)
Aside from units of weight, length, and volume, cognates to other standard units (SI) are also prevalent in languages around the world. These include words for measuring electricity (watt, volt, ampere), radiation (röntgen), atoms (mole), and force (newton). While these cognates do exist, they are much less likely to be part of everyday speech or part of the average speaker's lexicon, with the exception of watt and volt. The weight-measure ton also has large number global cognates.
Unsurprisingly, units of measurement for time are much less often borrowed and have no cognates close to the scale of standard units.
Non-SI Units
While the relatively new metric system (a bit over 200 years old) has words with cognates around the world, older measuring systems are in the opposite situation. One example is the imperial system which is so old that it's been remade and changed dozens of times across languages. As such terms like feet, pounds, and miles do have some cognates (foot: Korean piteu, Russian fut, Thai fút) but a whole host of languages simply translate 'foot' (measurement) with the local word for 'foot' (the body part). Moreover, it would be hard to consider any of these words as widespread cognates when most people outside the US never don't talk in feet, inches, and pounds.
The only non-SI units to gain widespread traction are mile and gallon.
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