Meters to Twips (m to twip)

1 meter equals 56,692.91339 twips (rounded).

1 meter = 56,692.91339 twips

How to convert meters to twips

To convert meters to twips, multiply the number of meters by 56,692.91339. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply twips by 0.00001763888889 (rounded).

twips = meters × 56,692.91339

Example: 10 meters = 566,929.1339 twips.

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

Twip (twip)

Typography & screenCurrent unit

1/20 of a point (1/1,440 inch). Used in the Rich Text Format specification and some software.

A contraction of twentieth of a point, the twip is a deliberately tiny unit meant for software that wants whole-number layout. Wikipedia gives it as 1/20 point, or 1/1440 inch, about 17.64 micrometers (0.01764 mm). That inch fraction only works if the point is the desktop publishing point of 1/72 inch, which is the definition the figure used here assumes.

Visual Basic 6 and earlier used twips as the default unit, and Microsoft's Rich Text Format uses them to exchange documents between platforms. OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice take it as their base length unit, and Symbian OS used it to scale bitmaps. Flash is a trap: its internal twips are really 1/20 of a logical pixel, which makes them three quarters of a true twip. Wikipedia's article also words the name two ways, as a twentieth of a point or of an inch point, and notes that it lacks citations.

1 twip = 0.00001763888889 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Twip; Wikipedia: Point (typography)

Related conversions

See all length units.