Feet to Nautical Leagues (ft to nlea)

1 foot equals 0.00005485961123 nautical leagues (rounded).

1 foot = 0.00005485961123 nautical leagues

How to convert feet to nautical leagues

To convert feet to nautical leagues, multiply the number of feet by 0.00005485961123. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply nautical leagues by 18,228.34646 (rounded).

nautical leagues = feet × 0.00005485961123

Example: 10 feet = 0.0005485961123 nautical leagues.

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

Nautical League (nlea)

NauticalHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

Three nautical miles (5.556 km). Used at sea; the title of Jules Verne's novel counts distance in these.

Jules Verne's 1870 novel title promises twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, a number that would circle the planet several times over, and the unit behind it is worth unpacking. Leagues descend from a Celtic measure that Rome took over as the leuga, supposedly about what a person could walk in an hour. Seafaring nations later adapted the word to the water, where distance was reckoned from the sea rather than from the road.

At sea, English usage made a league three nautical miles. With the international nautical mile fixed at exactly 1,852 m by a hydrographic conference at Monaco in 1929, that gives 5,556 m, the figure used here, or 5.556 km. It equals thirty cables and covers three minutes of latitude. Earlier national nautical miles differed a little, and Portugal and Spain defined maritime leagues from fractions of a degree of meridian, so values near 5.5 to 6.2 km turn up in older texts. Verne's league was a French unit, a metric one of 4,000 m having been legal in France from 1812 to 1840, and the nautical league is now only historical.

1 nautical league = 5,556 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: League (unit); Wikipedia: Nautical mile

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