Centimetre

Centimetre

a carpenters' ruler with centimetre divisions
Unit information
Unit system metric
Unit of length
Symbol cm
Unit conversions
1 cm in ...... is equal to ...
   SI units    10 mm
   imperial & US system    ~0.3937 in
Look up centimetre in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
For a broader coverage related to this topic, see metre.

A centimetre (international spelling as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures; symbol cm) or centimeter (American spelling) is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to one hundredth of a metre, centi being the SI prefix for a factor of 1100.[1] The centimetre was the base unit of length in the now deprecated centimetre–gram–second (CGS) system of units.

Though for many physical quantities, SI prefixes for factors of 103—like milli- and kilo-—are often preferred by technicians, the centimetre remains a practical unit of length for many everyday measurements. A centimetre is approximately the width of the fingernail of an average adult person.

Equivalence to other units of length

1 centimetre = 10 millimetres
= 0.01 metres
= 0.393700787401574803149606299212598425196850 inches
 (There are exactly 2.54 centimetres in one inch.)

One 1 millilitre is defined as one cubic centimetre, under the SI system of units.

Other uses

In addition to its use in the measurement of length, the centimetre is used:

Unicode symbols

For the purposes of compatibility with Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) characters, Unicode has symbols for:[4]

They are mostly used only with East Asian fixed-width CJK fonts, because they are equal in size to one Chinese character.

See also

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/16/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.