Arshins to Meters (arshin to m)

1 arshin equals 0.7112 meters exactly.

1 arshin = 0.7112 meters

How to convert arshins to meters

To convert arshins to meters, multiply the number of arshins by 0.7112. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 1.406074241 (rounded).

meters = arshins × 0.7112

Example: 10 arshins = 7.112 meters.

About these units

Arshin (arshin)

Russian (Imperial)Historical unit (no longer in standard use)

Exactly 28 inches (71.12 cm). The standard Russian cloth and trade measure until metrication in 1918.

Arshin was the working yardstick of Russian trade, used above all for cloth, ribbon and timber. The word reached Russian from the Turkish world, where a similar unit, the arşın, was the distance from the shoulder to the fingertips, and the Russian version was originally reckoned the same way, as the length of a man's arm. The name also came to mean the measuring rod itself.

Sources from the 16th century describe a Russian arshin of about 27 inches. Under Peter the Great in the 18th century it was fixed at exactly 28 English inches, which is the 71.12 cm used here. Because that definition is tied to the inch, the metric value follows from the 2.54 cm inch and carries no real uncertainty.

Sixteen vershoks make one arshin, and three arshins make a sazhen. Shopkeepers across the empire kept to it until metric weights and measures became compulsory in 1918, and a metre today is a little over 1.4 arshins.

1 arshin = 0.7112 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Arshin (length); Wikipedia: Obsolete Russian units of measurement

Meter (m)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI base unit of length. Since 1983 it is defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

Meter comes from the Greek metron, a measure. In 1791 the French National Assembly defined it as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole along a great circle through Paris, after rejecting the length of a seconds pendulum because that length changes with local gravity. The surveyors Delambre and Méchain measured the meridian arc, and in 1799 a platinum bar known as the Mètre des Archives became the physical standard. NIST notes that this Earth-based meter turned out to be about 0.2 mm shorter than the true pole-to-equator fraction it was meant to represent.

The 1875 Treaty of the Meter created the CGPM and the BIPM to look after common standards, and in 1889 a platinum-iridium prototype bar took over; the original is still kept at the BIPM. In 1960 the meter was tied to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of an orange-red krypton-86 line, and in 1983 to the speed of light, which made length a quantity derived from the time standard. The 2018 revision reworded that definition without changing the meter's size. NIST offers a handy yardstick for scale: a pace, meaning two steps, is roughly a meter or a yard.

The meter is the reference unit for length on this site.

Sources: BIPM: history of the metre; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Metre

Related conversions

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