Meters to Vershoks (m to vershok)

1 meter equals 22.49718785 vershoks (rounded).

1 meter = 22.49718785 vershoks

How to convert meters to vershoks

To convert meters to vershoks, multiply the number of meters by 22.49718785. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply vershoks by 0.04445.

vershoks = meters × 22.49718785

Example: 10 meters = 224.9718785 vershoks.

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

Vershok (vershok)

Russian (Imperial)Historical unit (no longer in standard use)

1.75 inches (4.445 cm), the Russian 'finger-breadth'. Sixteen vershoks make an arshin.

Vershok comes from a Russian word for a tip or top, and the unit was the smallest everyday step in the Russian system of body-derived lengths, roughly the breadth of the two upper joints of a finger. Tailors, carpenters and merchants counted heights and small dimensions in it, and it was usually quoted as the amount by which a person or an object stood above the next full arshin.

The figure used here is 4.445 cm, which is exactly one and three quarter English inches and one sixteenth of an arshin. That tidy fit is no accident: Peter the Great fixed the arshin at 28 English inches in the 18th century, so the vershok inherited an English-inch size. Five arshins therefore span 80 vershoks, or 140 inches.

The unit lingers in language. The proverb about a child being two vershoks above the pot, meaning very small, still turns up in Russian speech. Russia made the metric system optional in 1900 and compulsory in 1918, and the old units were formally replaced in the Soviet Union in 1925.

1 vershok = 0.04445 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Vershok; Wikipedia: Obsolete Russian units of measurement

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