Hectometers to Meters (hm to m)

1 hectometer equals 100 meters exactly.

1 hectometer = 100 meters

How to convert hectometers to meters

To convert hectometers to meters, multiply the number of hectometers by 100. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.01.

meters = hectometers × 100

Example: 10 hectometers = 1,000 meters.

About these units

Hectometer (hm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

100 meters. An official SI unit, rarely used.

Hecto, the prefix for one hundred, dates to 1795 in Wikipedia's table of metric prefixes, which makes the hectometer (hm) a contemporary of the original French system. It equals 100 meters, one tenth of a kilometer, or about 328 feet. English speakers rarely use it, and the Wikipedia article flags even that claim as lacking a citation.

Its best-known appearance is hidden in another word. The hectare is a square hectometer, 10,000 square meters, so every land listing in hectares quietly rests on this length. A football pitch is about one hectometer long, and the Great Pyramid of Giza, at 137.7 m, stands about 1.377 hm high. Military writers have occasionally given target ranges in hectometers, with Wikipedia citing a 1927 Field Artillery Journal among its examples. The unit sits between the decameter at 10 m and the kilometer at 1,000 m.

1 hectometer = 100 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Hectometre; Wikipedia: Metric prefix; NIST: metric (SI) prefixes

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

Related conversions

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