Hands to Yards (hh to yd)
1 hand equals 0.1111111111 yards (rounded).
How to convert hands to yards
To convert hands to yards, multiply the number of hands by 0.1111111111. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply yards by 9.
yards = hands × 0.1111111111
Example: 10 hands = 1.111111111 yards.
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
Yard (yd)
3 feet or 36 inches, exactly 0.9144 meters. Used for sports fields, fabric and short distances in the US and UK.
Yard descends from the Old English gerd or gyrd, meaning a branch, stave or measuring rod. It first appears in the late seventh-century laws of Ine of Wessex, though there it names a tax unit, the yardland. Around 959 to 963 King Edgar ordered that the measure held at Winchester be used throughout his realm, the earliest record of a prototype. A story that Henry I fixed the yard as the distance from his nose to his thumb is later folklore, and the true origin, whether pace, cubit or waist, remains speculative.
Britain defined the Imperial Standard Yard in 1824 as the distance between two marks on a brass rod at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. A fire in 1834 damaged the standard, a replacement was made in 1845, and the Weights and Measures Act 1855 recognized it. The 1959 international agreement then fixed the yard at exactly 0.9144 meter. Today it measures American and Canadian football fields, association football pitches and cricket pitches, appears on UK road signs for short distances, and is still used to sell fabric in the US and UK.
1 yard = 0.9144 meters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Yard; Wikipedia: Inch; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors
Related conversions
- Yards to hands (reverse)
- Hands to meters
- Hands to kilometers
- Hands to centimeters
- Hands to millimeters
- Hands to inches
- Hands to feet
- Hands to miles
- Meters to yards
- Kilometers to yards
- Centimeters to yards
- Millimeters to yards
- Inches to yards
- Feet to yards
- Miles to yards
- Micrometers to yards
- Nanometers to yards
- Nautical miles to yards
- Pixels (CSS) to yards
- Light-years to yards
See all length units.