Hands to Feet (hh to ft)
1 hand equals 0.3333333333 feet (rounded).
How to convert hands to feet
To convert hands to feet, multiply the number of hands by 0.3333333333. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply feet by 3.
feet = hands × 0.3333333333
Example: 10 hands = 3.333333333 feet.
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
Foot (ft)
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
Related conversions
- Feet to hands (reverse)
- Hands to meters
- Hands to kilometers
- Hands to centimeters
- Hands to millimeters
- Hands to inches
- Hands to yards
- Hands to miles
- Meters to feet
- Kilometers to feet
- Centimeters to feet
- Millimeters to feet
- Inches to feet
- Yards to feet
- Miles to feet
- Micrometers to feet
- Nanometers to feet
- Nautical miles to feet
- Pixels (CSS) to feet
- Light-years to feet
See all length units.