Not here in England and I doubt in the US either.
A thou is a thousandth of an inch, i.e. 0.001".
A tenth, when people are talking about machining, generally means a ten thousandth of an inch, i.e. 0.0001"
When talking about dimensions in machining (where imperial measurements are being used), one thousandth of an inch tends to be considered the coarsest 'resolution' for reasonable precision.
If precision doesn't really matter, people do talk in coarser resolutions ("Oh it was about half an inch" or "Yeah, if you give it a diameter of 7/16, that'll be fine") but often, machining tends to require precision of at least a few thou, so that's how people talk.
In the rest of the world (i.e. not the US and the UK; although model engineers in the UK are increasingly changing to metric too), machinists (hobby or professional) talk in millimetres or decimal fractions thereof or if the required precision is really tight, microns (one millionth of a millimetre).