Meters to Pouces (m to pouce)

1 meter equals 36.94133333 pouces (rounded).

1 meter = 36.94133333 pouces

How to convert meters to pouces

To convert meters to pouces, multiply the number of meters by 36.94133333. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply pouces by 0.02706994875 (rounded).

pouces = meters × 36.94133333

Example: 10 meters = 369.4133333 pouces.

About these units

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

Pouce (pouce)

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

The old French inch, about 2.707 cm; slightly longer than the English inch.

Pouce means thumb in French, the same body-part logic found in many inch-like units. In the royal system it was one twelfth of the pied du roi, which gives about 27.07 millimetres, or roughly 1.066 English inches. Each pouce was in turn divided into twelve lignes.

Craftsmen, surveyors and builders across France quoted lengths in pieds, pouces and lignes until the metric reforms of the 1790s, and the pouce was the natural unit for small dimensions. Because the French inch was slightly longer than the English one, converting between the two traditions always needs the exact ratio and not a rough equivalence.

The pouce shared the history of the foot it came from. Its size depended on the royal standard, which was an iron toise bar kept in Paris, and that bar was replaced after it was found deformed in 1668. Under the metric law of 1799 it was fixed in relation to the metre, and the same ratio is quoted today.

1 pouce = 0.02706994875 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Pied du roi; Wikipedia: Traditional French units of measurement; Wikipedia: Toise

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