Egyptian Fingers to Kilometers (digit to km)
1 Egyptian finger equals 0.00001875 kilometers exactly.
How to convert Egyptian fingers to kilometers
To convert Egyptian fingers to kilometers, multiply the number of Egyptian fingers by 0.00001875. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply kilometers by 53,333.33333 (rounded).
kilometers = Egyptian fingers × 0.00001875
Example: 10 Egyptian fingers = 0.0001875 kilometers.
Approximate value. Standards for the Egyptian finger varied by place and period, so this converter uses the most commonly cited value. Treat results as estimates, not exact figures.
About these units
Egyptian Finger (digit)
One 28th of a royal cubit, about 1.875 cm. The smallest standard division of Egyptian length.
Egyptian length units seem to have begun as parts of the body, and the finger, or digit, is the smallest of them: the width of a finger. Modern writers also call it a fingerbreadth, and the Egyptian word is given as tebā. It was the basic subdivision of the royal cubit, which held 28 fingers, and four fingers made one palm. The figure used here, 1.875 cm, is simply the royal cubit of about 52.5 cm divided by 28.
Because the finger depends on the cubit, it carries the same uncertainty. Surviving cubit rods run from roughly 52.35 to 52.92 cm, which puts a finger anywhere between about 1.87 and 1.89 cm, and Wikipedia's article on Egyptian units quotes about 1.875 cm. The rods themselves were marked in fingers, which let craftsmen and builders read off small distances directly. In modern terms a finger is a little under two centimetres, or about three quarters of an inch.
1 Egyptian finger = 0.01875 meters (approximately).
Sources: Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian units of measurement; Wikipedia: Cubit
Kilometer (km)
1,000 meters. The standard unit for road distances in most countries.
A name for 1,000 meters took a while to settle. In 1793 France's National Convention made the metre the sole French unit of length, and the first proposed name for the thousand-metre multiple was millaire. Everyday French usage then leaned on the myriametre, 10,000 meters, well into the 1800s. The Netherlands adopted the kilometre in 1817, under the local name mijl, and made it the only official unit of that size in 1867. In 1935 the CIPM dropped the myria- prefix, which left the kilometre as the standard unit for road-scale distances.
Kilo- is the SI prefix for a thousand, and the kilometre is now the preferred unit for land distances in most of the world, with the United States, the United Kingdom and Liberia among those that still use the mile. One kilometre is about 0.621 mile. The main span of Lisbon's 25 de Abril Bridge, at 1.013 km, gives a sense of the scale. Even its pronunciation has been argued over: in 1970 Australia's Metric Conversion Board made stress on the first syllable official, although Prime Minister Gough Whitlam argued for stress on the second. Military slang in several countries calls it a klick.
1 kilometer = 1,000 meters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Kilometre; Wikipedia: Metric prefix; BIPM: history of the metre
Related conversions
- Kilometers to Egyptian fingers (reverse)
- Egyptian fingers to meters
- Egyptian fingers to centimeters
- Egyptian fingers to millimeters
- Egyptian fingers to inches
- Egyptian fingers to feet
- Egyptian fingers to yards
- Egyptian fingers to miles
- Meters to kilometers
- Centimeters to kilometers
- Millimeters to kilometers
- Inches to kilometers
- Feet to kilometers
- Yards to kilometers
- Miles to kilometers
- Micrometers to kilometers
- Nanometers to kilometers
- Nautical miles to kilometers
- Pixels (CSS) to kilometers
- Light-years to kilometers
See all length units.