Feet to Ken (ft to ken)

1 foot equals 0.16764 ken exactly.

1 foot = 0.16764 ken

How to convert feet to ken

To convert feet to ken, multiply the number of feet by 0.16764. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply ken by 5.965163445 (rounded).

ken = feet × 0.16764

Example: 10 feet = 1.6764 ken.

About these units

Foot (ft)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

12 inches. Defined as exactly 0.3048 meters. Still the standard unit for height, altitude in aviation and room dimensions in the US and UK.

Human anatomy supplied the idea: an adult foot is roughly 15 percent of body height. Ancient cultures turned that into standards, but not the same one. The Greek pous was about 302 mm, the standard Roman pes about 295.7 mm, and a Harappan foot of about 335 mm has been reported from the Indus Valley. Historically, a foot fell somewhere between about 250 and 335 mm. Charlemagne tried to standardize units around 790 with little lasting success, and in 1593 English law fixed the statute mile at 5,280 feet.

The modern foot dates from the 1959 International Yard and Pound Agreement, which defined the yard as exactly 0.9144 meter and so the foot as exactly 0.3048 meter; the UK adopted it on 1 January 1964. The US survey foot, defined in 1893 as 1200/3937 meter, was deprecated on 31 December 2022. Feet remain in everyday use for height and rooms in the US, and ISO shipping containers are defined in them. Aviation altitudes use them too: flight level 330 means 33,000 feet.

1 foot = 0.3048 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Foot (unit); Wikipedia: Mile; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Ken (ken)

JapaneseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Six shaku, exactly 20/11 meter (about 1.818 m). The traditional spacing of pillars in Japanese buildings; a tatami mat is half a ken wide in the Nagoya size.

Ken is the Japanese reading of the Chinese character jian, which means room, gap or interval. The name fits its job: the distance between two pillars of a building became a unit of measure, and land surveyors then used it when assessing taxes.

Its size has not always been the same. Under Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 16th century it was about 1.97 meters, but around 1650 the Tokugawa shogunate shortened it to 1.818 meters, which raised the tax take. Since 1891 it has been exactly six shaku, or 20/11 meter. The longer old measure lives on in the Kyoto room size called kyoma.

Floor plans still lean on the ken. A tatami mat measures one half ken by one ken in the common Nagoya size, and a square ken of floor is a tsubo, about 3.31 square meters. The ken also fixes the length of the bo staff in Japanese martial arts.

1 ken = 1.818181818 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Ken (unit); Wikipedia: Tatami; Wikipedia: Japanese units of measurement

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