Metre

This article is about the unit of length. For other uses of "metre" or "meter", see Meter (disambiguation).

metre
File:Metric standards Rijksmuseum.jpg Historical replicas of metric standards, including an iron metre
General information
Unit system	SI
Unit of	length
Symbol	m
Conversions
1 m in ...	... is equal to ...
Imperial/US units	≈ 1.0936 yd ≈ 3.2808 ft ≈ 39.37 in
Nautical units	≈ 0.00053996 nmi

The metre (or meter in US spelling; symbol: m) is the base unit of length in the International System of Units (SI). Since 2019, the metre has been defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of ⁠1/299792458⁠ of a second, where the second is defined by a hyperfine transition frequency of caesium.

The metre was originally defined in 1791 by the French National Assembly as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, setting 10000 km as that quarter of the Earth's polar circumference.

In 1799, the metre was redefined in terms of a prototype metre bar. The bar used was changed in 1889, and in 1960 the metre was redefined in terms of a certain number of wavelengths of a certain emission line of krypton-86. The current definition was adopted in 1983 and modified slightly in 2002 to clarify that the metre is a measure of proper length. From 1983 until 2019, the metre was formally defined as the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum in ⁠1/299792458⁠ of a second. After the 2019 revision of the SI, this definition was rephrased to include the definition of a second in terms of the caesium frequency Δν_Cs. This series of amendments did not alter the size of the metre significantly – modern measurements of the Earth's polar circumference give a figure of 40007.863 km.

Spelling

Metre is the standard spelling of the metric unit for length in nearly all English-speaking nations, the exceptions being the United States and the Philippines which use meter.

Measuring devices (such as ammeter, speedometer) are spelled "-meter" in all variants of English. The suffix "-meter" has the same Greek origin as the unit of length.

Etymology

The etymological roots of metre can be traced to the Greek verb μετρέω (metreo) ((I) measure, count or compare) and noun μέτρον (metron) (a measure), which were used for physical measurement, for poetic metre and by extension for moderation or avoiding extremism (as in "be measured in your response"). This range of uses is also found in Latin (metior, mensura), French (mètre, mesure), English and other languages. The Greek word is derived from the Proto-Indo-European root *meh₁- 'to measure'. In English, the use of the word metre (for the French unit mètre) began at least as early as 1797.

History of definition

section excerpt History of the metre.[edit]

File:Metric standards Rijksmuseum.jpg

Replicas of historical metric standards, including an iron copy of the mètre des Archives.

During the French Revolution, the traditional units of measure were to be replaced by consistent measures based on natural phenomena. As a base unit of length, scientists had favoured the seconds pendulum (a pendulum with a half-period of one second) one century earlier, but this was rejected as it had been discovered that this length varied from place to place with local gravity. The mètre was introduced – defined as one ten-millionth of the shortest distance from the North Pole to the equator passing through Paris, assuming an Earth flattening of ⁠1/334⁠.

Following the arc measurement of Delambre and Méchain, the historical French official standard of the metre was made available in the form of the Mètre des Archives, a platinum bar held in Paris. It was originally also planned to dematerialise the definition of the metre by counting the number of swings of a one-metre-long pendulum during a day at a latitude of 45°. However, dematerialising the definition of units of length by means of the pendulum would prove less reliable than artefacts.

During the mid nineteenth century, following the American Revolution and the decolonisation of the Americas, the metre gained adoption in Americas, particularly in scientific usage, and it was officially established as an international measurement unit by the Metre Convention of 1875 at the beginning of the Second Industrial Revolution.

The Mètre des Archives and its copies such as the Committee Meter were replaced from 1889 by a new standard metre made of platinum-iridium, and 29 bars calibrated against it were distributed to different nations. This improved standardisation involved the development of specialised measuring equipment and the definition of a reproducible temperature scale.

Progress in science finally allowed the definition of the metre to be dematerialised; thus in 1960 a new definition based on a specific number of wavelengths of light from a specific transition in krypton-86 allowed the standard to be universally available by measurement. In 1983 this was updated to a length defined in terms of the speed of light; this definition was reworded in 2019:

The metre, symbol m, is the SI unit of length. It is defined by taking the fixed numerical value of the speed of light in vacuum c to be 299792458 when expressed in the unit m⋅s⁻¹, where the second is defined in terms of the caesium frequency Δν_Cs.

Where older traditional length measures are still used, they are now defined in terms of the metre – for example the yard has since 1959 officially been defined as exactly 0.9144 metre.

SI prefixed forms of metre

Main article: Orders of magnitude (length)

SI prefixes can be used to denote decimal multiples and submultiples of the metre, as shown in the table below. Long distances are usually expressed in km, astronomical units (149,597,871 km), light-years (63,000 au; 9.5 trillion km), or parsecs (210,000 au; 31 trillion km), rather than in Mm or larger multiples. "30 cm", "30 m", and "300 m" are more common than "3 dm", "3 dam", and "3 hm", respectively.

The terms micron and millimicron have been used instead of micrometre (μm) and nanometre (nm), respectively, but this practice is discouraged.

SI multiples of metre (m)

Submultiples			Multiples
Value	SI symbol	Name	Value	SI symbol	Name
10−1 m	dm	decimetre	101 m	dam	decametre
10−2 m	cm	centimetre	102 m	hm	hectometre
10−3 m	mm	millimetre	103 m	km	kilometre
10−6 m	μm	micrometre	106 m	Mm	megametre
10−9 m	nm	nanometre	109 m	Gm	gigametre
10−12 m	pm	picometre	1012 m	Tm	terametre
10−15 m	fm	femtometre	1015 m	Pm	petametre
10−18 m	am	attometre	1018 m	Em	exametre
10−21 m	zm	zeptometre	1021 m	Zm	zettametre
10−24 m	ym	yoctometre	1024 m	Ym	yottametre
10−27 m	rm	rontometre	1027 m	Rm	ronnametre
10−30 m	qm	quectometre	1030 m	Qm	quettametre

Equivalents in other units

Metric unit expressed in non-SI units					Non-SI unit expressed in metric units
1 metre	≈	1.0936	yard		1 yard	=	0.9144	metre
1 metre	≈	39.370	inches		1 inch	=	0.0254	metre
1 centimetre	≈	0.39370	inch		1 inch	=	2.54	centimetres
1 millimetre	≈	0.039370	inch		1 inch	=	25.4	millimetres
1 metre	=	1010	ångström		1 ångström	=	10−10	metre
1 nanometre	=	10	ångström		1 ångström	=	100	picometres

Within this table, "inch" and "yard" mean "international inch" and "international yard" respectively, though approximate conversions in the left column hold for both international and survey units.

"≈" means "is approximately equal to";

"=" means "is exactly equal to".

One metre is exactly equivalent to ⁠5 000/127⁠ inches and to ⁠1 250/1 143⁠ yards.

A simple mnemonic to assist with conversion is "three 3s": 1 metre is nearly equivalent to 3 feet 3+3⁄8 inches. This gives an overestimate of 0.125 mm.

The ancient Egyptian cubit was about 0.5 m (surviving rods are 523–529 mm). Scottish and English definitions of the ell (2 cubits) were 941 mm (0.941 m) and 1143 mm (1.143 m) respectively. The ancient Parisian toise (fathom) was slightly shorter than 2 m and was standardised at exactly 2 m in the mesures usuelles system, such that 1 m was exactly 1⁄2 toise. The Russian verst was 1.0668 km. The Swedish mil was 10.688 km, but was changed to 10 km when Sweden converted to metric units.

See also

• ISO 1 – standard reference temperature for length measurements
• Metric prefix
• Metrication

References

Cited bibliography

• Astin, A. V. & Karo, H. Arnold, (1959), Refinement of values for the yard and the pound, Washington DC: National Bureau of Standards, republished on National Geodetic Survey web site and the Federal Register (Doc. 59–5442, Filed, 30 June 1959)
• Historical context of the SI: Meter. Retrieved 26 May 2010.
• National Institute of Standards and Technology. (27 June 2011). NIST-F1 Cesium Fountain Atomic Clock. Author.
• National Physical Laboratory. (25 March 2010). Iodine-Stabilised Lasers. Author.
• Republic of the Philippines. (2 December 1978). Batas Pambansa Blg. 8: An Act Defining the Metric System and its Units, Providing for its Implementation and for Other Purposes. Author.
• Republic of the Philippines. (10 October 1991). Republic Act No. 7160: The Local Government Code of the Philippines. Author.
• Supreme Court of the Philippines (Second Division). (20 January 2010). G.R. No. 185240. Author.
• Taylor, B.N. and Thompson, A. (Eds.). (2008a). The International System of Units (SI). United States version of the English text of the eighth edition (2006) of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures publication Le Système International d' Unités (SI) (Special Publication 330). Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology. Retrieved 18 August 2008.
• Taylor, B.N. and Thompson, A. (2008b). Guide for the Use of the International System of Units (Special Publication 811). Gaithersburg, MD: National Institute of Standards and Technology. Retrieved 23 August 2008.
• Turner, J. (deputy director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology). (16 May 2008). "Interpretation of the International System of Units (the Metric System of Measurement) for the United States". Federal Register Vol. 73, No. 96, p. 28432–28433.
• Zagar, B.G. (1999). Laser interferometer displacement sensors in J.G. Webster (ed.). The Measurement, Instrumentation, and Sensors Handbook. CRC Press. .