Kilometers to Ken (km to ken)

1 kilometer equals 550 ken exactly.

1 kilometer = 550 ken

How to convert kilometers to ken

To convert kilometers to ken, multiply the number of kilometers by 550. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply ken by 0.001818181818 (rounded).

ken = kilometers × 550

Example: 10 kilometers = 5,500 ken.

About these units

Kilometer (km)

Metric (SI)Current unit

1,000 meters. The standard unit for road distances in most countries.

A name for 1,000 meters took a while to settle. In 1793 France's National Convention made the metre the sole French unit of length, and the first proposed name for the thousand-metre multiple was millaire. Everyday French usage then leaned on the myriametre, 10,000 meters, well into the 1800s. The Netherlands adopted the kilometre in 1817, under the local name mijl, and made it the only official unit of that size in 1867. In 1935 the CIPM dropped the myria- prefix, which left the kilometre as the standard unit for road-scale distances.

Kilo- is the SI prefix for a thousand, and the kilometre is now the preferred unit for land distances in most of the world, with the United States, the United Kingdom and Liberia among those that still use the mile. One kilometre is about 0.621 mile. The main span of Lisbon's 25 de Abril Bridge, at 1.013 km, gives a sense of the scale. Even its pronunciation has been argued over: in 1970 Australia's Metric Conversion Board made stress on the first syllable official, although Prime Minister Gough Whitlam argued for stress on the second. Military slang in several countries calls it a klick.

1 kilometer = 1,000 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Kilometre; Wikipedia: Metric prefix; BIPM: history of the metre

Ken (ken)

JapaneseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Six shaku, exactly 20/11 meter (about 1.818 m). The traditional spacing of pillars in Japanese buildings; a tatami mat is half a ken wide in the Nagoya size.

Ken is the Japanese reading of the Chinese character jian, which means room, gap or interval. The name fits its job: the distance between two pillars of a building became a unit of measure, and land surveyors then used it when assessing taxes.

Its size has not always been the same. Under Toyotomi Hideyoshi in the 16th century it was about 1.97 meters, but around 1650 the Tokugawa shogunate shortened it to 1.818 meters, which raised the tax take. Since 1891 it has been exactly six shaku, or 20/11 meter. The longer old measure lives on in the Kyoto room size called kyoma.

Floor plans still lean on the ken. A tatami mat measures one half ken by one ken in the common Nagoya size, and a square ken of floor is a tsubo, about 3.31 square meters. The ken also fixes the length of the bo staff in Japanese martial arts.

1 ken = 1.818181818 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Ken (unit); Wikipedia: Tatami; Wikipedia: Japanese units of measurement

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