Chō to Centimeters (chō to cm)

1 chō equals 10,909.09091 centimeters (rounded).

1 chō = 10,909.09091 centimeters

How to convert chō to centimeters

To convert chō to centimeters, multiply the number of chō by 10,909.09091. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply centimeters by 0.00009166666667 (rounded).

centimeters = chō × 10,909.09091

Example: 10 chō = 109,090.9091 centimeters.

About these units

Chō (chō)

JapaneseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

60 ken, about 109.09 m. A traditional measure of distance along roads and the length of a block.

Cho is written with a character that also means town or block, and the unit appears under the same name for area, which Japanese Wikipedia notes alongside the length meaning. As a length it equals 60 ken, or 360 shaku, putting it between the ken and the ri.

Under the 1891 law it is exactly 1200/11 meter, about 109.09 meters or 358 feet. Because the ken was longer in the 16th century than after the Tokugawa reduction around 1650, a cho measured in an older document may have been several percent longer, so such figures should be treated as approximate.

Thirty-six cho make one ri, so the cho worked as a convenient step for road distances and field layouts. Today it is a historical and place-name unit: the modern metric replacement is simply about 109 meters, roughly one city block.

1 chō = 109.0909091 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Japanese units of measurement; Japanese Wikipedia: Shakkanho (尺貫法); Wikipedia: Ken (unit)

Centimeter (cm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One hundredth of a meter. Used for body measurements, clothing and everyday objects.

Scientists, rather than shopkeepers, gave the centimeter its place. In 1832 Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed a system of absolute units built on length, mass and time, choosing the millimeter, milligram and second. In 1873 a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, whose members included James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), recommended the centimeter, gram and second instead. That CGS system dominated physics for decades, until the metre-kilogram-second system replaced it in the mid-twentieth century and led to SI.

CGS units proved awkward for rooms and buildings, which run to hundreds of centimeters, but the centimeter itself never went away. It is still the everyday unit for height, clothing and small objects, and it appears in map scales and rainfall reports. An adult fingernail is roughly one centimeter wide, and a milliliter is defined as exactly one cubic centimeter. An inch is exactly 2.54 centimeters. The CGS system itself survives mainly in theoretical physics and astrophysics, where Gaussian units are still common.

1 centimeter = 0.01 meters (exactly).

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

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