Meters to Hands (m to hh)
1 meter equals 9.842519685 hands (rounded).
How to convert meters to hands
To convert meters to hands, multiply the number of meters by 9.842519685. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply hands by 0.1016.
hands = meters × 9.842519685
Example: 10 meters = 98.42519685 hands.
About these units
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
Hand (hh)
Exactly 4 inches (10.16 cm). Used almost only to measure the height of horses at the withers.
Horse people still say a mare stands fifteen hands, and the word is the same Old English hand that names the body part. The unit was first the breadth of a hand, with or without the thumb, or the height of a clenched fist, and the figure varied from person to person. Ancient Egyptian cubit-rods show a comparable hand of five digits, roughly 94 mm. In England, a Horses Act of 1540 under Henry VIII fixed the hand at four inches, and some later dictionaries still muddled it with the three-inch handsbreadth.
The figure used here is exactly 4 inches, or 10.16 cm. Fractions are counted in inches, not tenths, so a height written 15.2 means fifteen hands and two inches, which is 62 inches, and 15.3 is followed directly by 16.0. The height is taken at the withers, the ridge between the shoulder blades. The unit survives for horses and ponies in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand, while continental Europe and international equestrian competition use metric.
1 hand = 0.1016 meters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Hand (unit); Wiktionary: hand
Related conversions
- Hands to meters (reverse)
- Meters to kilometers
- Meters to centimeters
- Meters to millimeters
- Meters to inches
- Meters to feet
- Meters to yards
- Meters to miles
- Meters to micrometers
- Meters to nanometers
- Meters to nautical miles
- Meters to pixels (CSS)
- Meters to light-years
- Kilometers to hands
- Centimeters to hands
- Millimeters to hands
- Inches to hands
- Feet to hands
- Yards to hands
- Miles to hands
See all length units.