Square Centimeter (cm²)

Metric (SI)Current unit

A square one centimeter on a side; 1/10,000 of a square meter.

1 square centimeter = 0.0001 square meters (exactly).

About the square centimeter

Physicists, rather than surveyors, put the centimeter at the center of a measuring system. Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed absolute units based on length, mass and time in 1832, choosing the millimeter, and in 1873 a British Association committee including James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) recommended the centimeter, gram and second instead. In that CGS system the square centimeter turns up inside derived units, such as the stokes of kinematic viscosity, defined as one square centimeter per second.

A square centimeter is one ten-thousandth of a square meter, so 10,000 of them fill a square meter. It is a natural size for small flat things: a square inch is exactly 6.4516 cm², and a square foot is exactly 929.0304 cm². Because the CGS system defined force and pressure with the centimeter, the dyne per square centimeter became its unit of pressure, called the barye, which equals 0.1 pascal. SI practice prefers the square meter for large areas and the square millimeter for very small ones.

Sources: Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; Wikipedia: Square centimetre; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Square Centimeter conversion chart

1 square centimeter expressed in every other area unit:

More Metric (SI) units

• square meter (area)
• square kilometer (area)
• hectare (area)
• square millimeter (area)
• are (area)
• meter (length)
• kilometer (length)
• centimeter (length)
• millimeter (length)
• micrometer (length)
• nanometer (length)
• picometer (length)
• decimeter (length)
• hectometer (length)
• decameter (length)
• kilogram (weight & mass)

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