Greek Feet to Meters (pous to m)

1 Greek foot (Olympic) equals 0.32 meters exactly.

1 Greek foot (Olympic) = 0.32 meters

How to convert Greek feet to meters

To convert Greek feet to meters, multiply the number of Greek feet by 0.32. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 3.125.

meters = Greek feet × 0.32

Example: 10 Greek feet = 3.2 meters.

Approximate value. Standards for the Greek foot (Olympic) varied by place and period, so this converter uses the most commonly cited value. Treat results as estimates, not exact figures.

About these units

Greek Foot (Olympic) (pous)

Ancient GreekHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)Approximate value

One 600th of the Olympic stadion, about 32.0 cm. Greek feet differed by city; the Attic foot was nearer 29.6 cm and the Aeginetan about 33.3 cm.

Greek pous simply means foot, and the plural is podes. Every city-state kept its own foot, so the word never named a single length. Aegina used a foot of about 333 mm, Athens one of about 296 mm, and a general-purpose table gives 308.2 mm. The value used here, roughly 32.0 cm, is the Olympic foot, which is derived by dividing a stadion of about 192 m by 600.

That makes the Olympic foot a reconstruction and not a measured object, and it moves with the stadion figure chosen. Scholars have also proposed stadia near 157 m, 185 m, 196 m and 209 m, implying feet from about 26 to 35 cm. Within a Greek system the foot divided into 16 daktyloi, or fingers, and 100 feet made a plethron, a little over 30 m in the standard table. A foot of about 32 cm is close to the modern English foot of 30.48 cm, only a little longer.

1 Greek foot (Olympic) = 0.32 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Ancient Greek units of measurement; Wikipedia: Stadion (unit)

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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