Lieues to Meters (lieue to m)

1 lieue (Paris league) equals 3,898.07262 meters (rounded).

1 lieue (Paris league) = 3,898.07262 meters

How to convert lieues to meters

To convert lieues to meters, multiply the number of lieues by 3,898.07262. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.000256537037 (rounded).

meters = lieues × 3,898.07262

Example: 10 lieues = 38,980.7262 meters.

About these units

Lieue (Paris League) (lieue)

French (Ancien Régime)Historical unit (no longer in standard use)

2,000 toises, about 3.898 km: the Paris league of 1674. The later post league (lieue de poste, 1737) was longer, at 2,200 toises or about 4.288 km.

Lieue descends from the Celtic league that the Romans adopted as the leuga. The Gallic version, about one and a half Roman miles, replaced the Roman mile as the official road distance in Gaul and Germania under Septimius Severus. In France the word later covered several different distances rather than one.

The figure used here, about 3,898 metres, is 2,000 toises, which Wikipedia's article on traditional French units calls the Paris league of 1674. The lieue de poste, which measured stages on the royal coach and mail routes, was set at 2,200 toises in 1737, about 4.288 kilometres. Wikipedia's league article lists the post league at the shorter 3,898 metres, so its two articles disagree about which league carried that name.

Other French leagues ranged from 10,000 to 14,400 pieds, or roughly 3.25 to 4.68 kilometres. The metric lieue of exactly 4,000 metres was used in the customary system between 1812 and 1840. Since the unit was never standardized, any conversion to kilometres should name which lieue is meant.

1 lieue (Paris league) = 3,898.07262 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: League (unit); Wikipedia: Traditional French units of measurement; Wikipedia: Toise

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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