Meters to Toises (m to toise)

1 meter equals 0.5130740741 toises (rounded).

1 meter = 0.5130740741 toises

How to convert meters to toises

To convert meters to toises, multiply the number of meters by 0.5130740741. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply toises by 1.94903631 (rounded).

toises = meters × 0.5130740741

Example: 10 meters = 5.130740741 toises.

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

Toise (toise)

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

Six pieds du roi, about 1.949 m. Used to define the length of the meter: the first metric standard was based on a ratio to the toise.

Latin tensa brachia, meaning outstretched arms, is the root of toise, and the unit began as a fathom-like span of a man's reach. Under the Ancien Régime it was fixed at six pieds du roi, 72 pouces or 864 lignes, which equals about 1.949 metres by the 1799 definition.

Its physical standard was an iron bar set into a wall of the Grand Châtelet in Paris, in place before 1394. After the bar bent, a replacement made in 1667 was about half a percent shorter. In 1735 two new geodetic standards were calibrated against it, and one of them, the Toise of Peru, took part in the Spanish-French Geodesic Mission and became the official standard in 1766.

The toise also shaped the metre. The 1799 metre was defined as 443.296 lignes, or 3 pieds and 11.296 lignes of the Toise of Peru, which matches 13,853 parts of 27,000 of a toise. Later French usage varied: from 1812 to 1840 the customary toise was set to exactly 2 metres, and other countries had their own toises, such as about 1.8 metres in Switzerland.

1 toise = 1.94903631 meters (approximately).

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

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