Barleycorns to Meters (bc to m)

1 barleycorn equals 0.008466666667 meters (rounded).

1 barleycorn = 0.008466666667 meters

How to convert barleycorns to meters

To convert barleycorns to meters, multiply the number of barleycorns by 0.008466666667. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply meters by 118.1102362 (rounded).

meters = barleycorns × 0.008466666667

Example: 10 barleycorns = 0.08466666667 meters.

About these units

Barleycorn (bc)

Medieval EnglishHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

One third of an inch. A medieval English unit defined as the length of a grain of barley; the origin of the shoe-size increment.

Three dry, round grains of barley laid end to end made an inch, according to an English statute known as the Composition of Yards and Perches, dated about 1300. The idea is older still, since the Welsh Laws of Hywel Dda in the 10th century used a similar rule. A barleycorn is therefore one third of an inch, about 8.47 mm, although Wikipedia's infobox rounds it to 8.46 mm. Wiktionary describes the word simply as a compound of barley and corn, meaning grain.

Real barley kernels range from roughly 4 to 15 mm depending on the cultivar, and older sources put the average near 8.8 mm, so the grain gave a notion of size, not a precise standard. Formal standards were later set by comparison with a reference yard bar, with the barleycorn taken as 1/108 of its length. A line is a quarter of a barleycorn and a poppyseed a quarter or fifth. The unit lives on mainly in shoe sizing in some English-speaking countries, where each size step is one barleycorn.

1 barleycorn = 0.008466666667 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Barleycorn (unit); Wiktionary: barleycorn

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

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