Ells to Meters (ell to m)

1 ell equals 1.143 meters exactly.

1 ell = 1.143 meters

How to convert ells to meters

To convert ells to meters, multiply the number of ells by 1.143. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.8748906387 (rounded).

meters = ells × 1.143

Example: 10 ells = 11.43 meters.

About these units

Ell (ell)

Medieval EnglishHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

45 inches (1.143 m). An English cloth measure, about the length of an arm. Other countries' ells ranged from about 0.46 m (Viking) to 1.37 m (the French aune).

Elbow and ell share a root: Old English eln meant the forearm, and the Latin ulna is a distant cousin. The ell began as an arm-length cubit, and later cloth ells grew longer. English tailors and drapers used one of 45 inches, a yard and a quarter, equal to 1.143 m, the figure used here. Edward I required every English town to keep an ell-wand as a standard rod for official measurement, and a surviving iron ell-wand hangs in a church on Gotland.

Each region had its own ell, which is why the unit is flagged as varying. A Scottish ell was about 37 inches (0.94 m), fixed in 1661 and abolished by the 1824 Weights and Measures Act. The Flemish ell was 27 inches (68.6 cm), and English importers of Dutch cloth bought by it. The French aune was about 137 cm, while German and Scandinavian ells were far shorter, from roughly 55 to 63 cm. Linen was sold by the English ell, but tapestry by the Flemish one.

1 ell = 1.143 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Ell; Wiktionary: ell

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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