Inches to Spans (in to span)

1 inch equals 0.1111111111 spans (rounded).

1 inch = 0.1111111111 spans

How to convert inches to spans

To convert inches to spans, multiply the number of inches by 0.1111111111. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply spans by 9.

spans = inches × 0.1111111111

Example: 10 inches = 1.111111111 spans.

About these units

Inch (in)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

1/12 of a foot. Defined as exactly 25.4 millimeters since 1959, when the US and Commonwealth countries agreed a common international inch.

Latin uncia, meaning one-twelfth, is the root of both inch and ounce, and it passed into Old English as ynce. Roman measurers divided their foot into twelve unciae, and the English inch kept that twelfth. After 1066 an inch was reckoned as three barleycorns, and a 1324 statute attributed to Edward II spelled out the definition as three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end lengthwise. For centuries the inch was simply a twelfth of a foot, or a thirty-sixth of a yard, and the US and UK each kept their own copy of the standard yard.

Those copies differed slightly until the 1959 international agreement fixed the yard at exactly 0.9144 meter, which made the inch exactly 25.4 millimeters. The US adopted it in 1959 and the UK ratified it in 1963, effective 1964. Today the inch is still the customary unit in the United States and Canada, and the UK keeps it on road signs. Worldwide it also names display diagonals, wheel rims, tire codes and pipe sizes.

1 inch = 0.0254 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Inch; Wikipedia: Yard; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Span (span)

Medieval EnglishHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

9 inches (22.86 cm), the distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger of a spread hand.

Stretch your fingers as wide as they go and the gap from thumb tip to little fingertip is a span. The English word descends from Old English spann and a Proto-Germanic form meaning handbreadth, itself tied to a root meaning to stretch. Greek writers had spithame, which appears in Herodotus in the 5th century BC, and Hesiod used a word meaning three spans long three centuries earlier. Ancient systems treated the span as half a cubit, or three palms.

The English handspan is 9 inches, or 22.86 cm, and Wiktionary notes it as an eighth of a fathom. That is the figure used here, though a hand's reach differs from person to person and other countries' spans differ too: about 23 cm for a Slovenian great span, 17.8 cm for the Russian piad, and 15 to 20 cm in Chinese usage. A little or short span, from thumb to index finger, was much smaller. The unit is now mostly a figure of speech, as in the span of a bridge or of a wing.

1 span = 0.2286 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Span (unit); Wiktionary: span

Related conversions

See all length units.