Egyptian Fingers to Meters (digit to m)
1 Egyptian finger equals 0.01875 meters exactly.
How to convert Egyptian fingers to meters
To convert Egyptian fingers to meters, multiply the number of Egyptian fingers by 0.01875. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 53.33333333 (rounded).
meters = Egyptian fingers × 0.01875
Example: 10 Egyptian fingers = 0.1875 meters.
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
Meter (m)
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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See all length units.