Leagues to Meters (lea to m)
1 league equals 4,828.032 meters exactly.
How to convert leagues to meters
To convert leagues to meters, multiply the number of leagues by 4,828.032. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.0002071237307 (rounded).
meters = leagues × 4,828.032
Example: 10 leagues = 48,280.32 meters.
About these units
League (lea)
Three statute miles (4.828 km). Said to be roughly the distance a person could walk in an hour; the length varied widely across Europe.
How far can a person walk in an hour? Roughly that question lies behind the league, which may once have approximated the answer. The Romans borrowed the idea from Gaul, calling it the leuga Gallica and fixing it at one and a half Roman miles, about 2.2 km. The word survives in several languages, yet the length it names has been anything from about 2.2 km to nearly 7.9 km depending on the country and the century.
In England the land league was most often three statute miles, which gives 4.83 km, or exactly 4,828.032 m, the figure used here. A medieval chronicle from Battle Abbey instead defined the English leuga as 7,680 feet. French lieues ranged from about 3.25 to 4.68 km, and a metric lieue of 4,000 m was legal from 1812 to 1840. The Spanish legua of about 5.57 km lasted in Latin America, where it also measured land area in early grants in Texas and New Mexico. No country defines it officially today.
1 league = 4,828.032 meters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: League (unit); Wikipedia: Mile
Meter (m)
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
- Meters to leagues (reverse)
- Leagues to kilometers
- Leagues to centimeters
- Leagues to millimeters
- Leagues to inches
- Leagues to feet
- Leagues to yards
- Leagues to miles
- Kilometers to meters
- Centimeters to meters
- Millimeters to meters
- Inches to meters
- Feet to meters
- Yards to meters
- Miles to meters
- Micrometers to meters
- Nanometers to meters
- Nautical miles to meters
- Pixels (CSS) to meters
- Light-years to meters
See all length units.