Egyptian Fingers to Millimeters (digit to mm)
1 Egyptian finger equals 18.75 millimeters exactly.
How to convert Egyptian fingers to millimeters
To convert Egyptian fingers to millimeters, multiply the number of Egyptian fingers by 18.75. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply millimeters by 0.05333333333 (rounded).
millimeters = Egyptian fingers × 18.75
Example: 10 Egyptian fingers = 187.5 millimeters.
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
Millimeter (mm)
One thousandth of a meter. Used in engineering, manufacturing and rainfall measurement.
Carl Friedrich Gauss put the millimeter at the base of his 1832 proposal for absolute units, pairing it with the milligram and the second, although the centimeter-based CGS system later won out among scientists. The name combines the metric prefix milli-, from the Latin for one thousand, with the meter. Since 1983 a millimeter has been tied to the speed of light: it is the distance light covers in 1/299,792,458,000 of a second.
Millimeters are the language of fine mechanical work. Standard rulers are divided into them, digital calipers commonly read to 0.01 mm, and mechanical pencil leads come in 0.5 and 0.7 mm. Copy paper is about 0.1 mm thick, and a thin hair, at 0.02 to 0.04 mm across, is close to the smallest thing the naked eye can see. A wave with a frequency of 300 GHz has a wavelength of 1 mm. An inch is exactly 25.4 mm. One trap for readers in the United States is that mil there traditionally means a thousandth of an inch, not a millimeter.
1 millimeter = 0.001 meters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Millimetre; Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors
Related conversions
- Millimeters to Egyptian fingers (reverse)
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See all length units.