Chō (area) to Square Meters (chō to m²)
1 chō (area) equals 9,917.355372 square meters (rounded).
How to convert chō (area) to square meters
To convert chō (area) to square meters, multiply the number of chō (area) by 9,917.355372. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply square meters by 0.0001008333333 (rounded).
square meters = chō (area) × 9,917.355372
Example: 10 chō (area) = 99,173.55372 square meters.
About these units
Chō (area) (chō)
3,000 tsubo, about 9,917 m² (roughly one hectare; 2.45 acres). Used for farmland in Japan.
Almost exactly a hectare, the cho is the largest of the everyday Japanese land units. It is 3,000 tsubo, or 1,200,000/121 square metres, about 9,917, which is 0.9917 hectare or roughly 2.45 acres. It is also 100 se or 10 tan, and when no fractional part follows it is often written cho-bu.
Because it is so near a hectare, it is a convenient mental bridge for anyone moving between traditional and metric figures. In Japan it has been used for farmland, and it sits at the top of the tsubo, se and tan ladder.
The name is shared with a unit of length, so the area sense needs to be stated. The area figure used here follows from the 10/33 metre shaku fixed by the 1891 Meiji law, and the 1951 Measurements Law took the traditional units out of official use from 1959.
1 chō (area) = 9,917.355372 square meters (approximately).
Sources: Wikipedia: Japanese units of measurement; Wikipedia: Shaku (unit); Wikipedia: Tsubo
Square Meter (m²)
The SI unit of area: a square one meter on each side. Used for floor areas and property sizes in most of the world.
Squaring the meter was built into the metric system from the start. The French law of 18 Germinal, Year III (7 April 1795) defined the are, the land unit that gave the hectare its name, as exactly 100 square meters, so the square meter was already the foundation of metric land measure. Nobody is credited with inventing it as a separate unit. It is simply the area of a square one meter on each side, and any SI prefix that works for the meter works for it, with the prefix squared along with the unit.
That squaring catches people out: a square kilometer is one million square meters, not one thousand. Since 1983 the meter has been defined through the speed of light, so the square meter is tied to a constant of nature as well as to the second. A hectare, about the area of Trafalgar Square in London, is 10,000 square meters. In everyday terms one square meter is about 10.76 square feet. Unicode has a compatibility character for it, but the recommended way to write it is the plain superscript two: m².
The square meter is the reference unit for area on this site.
Sources: Wikipedia: Square metre; Wikipedia: Are (unit); NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition
Related conversions
- Square meters to chō (area) (reverse)
- Chō (area) to square kilometers
- Chō (area) to hectares
- Chō (area) to square inches
- Chō (area) to square feet
- Chō (area) to square yards
- Chō (area) to acres
- Chō (area) to square miles
- Square kilometers to square meters
- Hectares to square meters
- Square inches to square meters
- Square feet to square meters
- Square yards to square meters
- Acres to square meters
- Square miles to square meters
- Square centimeters to square meters
- Square millimeters to square meters
- Tsubo to square meters
- Pyeong to square meters
- Rai (Thai) to square meters
See all area units.