Hands to Centimeters (hh to cm)
1 hand equals 10.16 centimeters exactly.
How to convert hands to centimeters
To convert hands to centimeters, multiply the number of hands by 10.16. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply centimeters by 0.09842519685 (rounded).
centimeters = hands × 10.16
Example: 10 hands = 101.6 centimeters.
About these units
Hand (hh)
Exactly 4 inches (10.16 cm). Used almost only to measure the height of horses at the withers.
Horse people still say a mare stands fifteen hands, and the word is the same Old English hand that names the body part. The unit was first the breadth of a hand, with or without the thumb, or the height of a clenched fist, and the figure varied from person to person. Ancient Egyptian cubit-rods show a comparable hand of five digits, roughly 94 mm. In England, a Horses Act of 1540 under Henry VIII fixed the hand at four inches, and some later dictionaries still muddled it with the three-inch handsbreadth.
The figure used here is exactly 4 inches, or 10.16 cm. Fractions are counted in inches, not tenths, so a height written 15.2 means fifteen hands and two inches, which is 62 inches, and 15.3 is followed directly by 16.0. The height is taken at the withers, the ridge between the shoulder blades. The unit survives for horses and ponies in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, while continental Europe and international equestrian competition use metric.
1 hand = 0.1016 meters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Hand (unit); Wiktionary: hand
Centimeter (cm)
One hundredth of a meter. Used for body measurements, clothing and everyday objects.
Scientists, rather than shopkeepers, gave the centimeter its place. In 1832 Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed a system of absolute units built on length, mass and time, choosing the millimeter, milligram and second. In 1873 a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, whose members included James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), recommended the centimeter, gram and second instead. That CGS system dominated physics for decades, until the metre-kilogram-second system replaced it in the mid-twentieth century and led to SI.
CGS units proved awkward for rooms and buildings, which run to hundreds of centimeters, but the centimeter itself never went away. It is still the everyday unit for height, clothing and small objects, and it appears in map scales and rainfall reports. An adult fingernail is roughly one centimeter wide, and a milliliter is defined as exactly one cubic centimeter. An inch is exactly 2.54 centimeters. The CGS system itself survives mainly in theoretical physics and astrophysics, where Gaussian units are still common.
1 centimeter = 0.01 meters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; Wikipedia: Centimetre; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors
Related conversions
- Centimeters to hands (reverse)
- Hands to meters
- Hands to kilometers
- Hands to millimeters
- Hands to inches
- Hands to feet
- Hands to yards
- Hands to miles
- Meters to centimeters
- Kilometers to centimeters
- Millimeters to centimeters
- Inches to centimeters
- Feet to centimeters
- Yards to centimeters
- Miles to centimeters
- Micrometers to centimeters
- Nanometers to centimeters
- Nautical miles to centimeters
- Pixels (CSS) to centimeters
- Light-years to centimeters
See all length units.