Nautical Leagues to Millimeters (nlea to mm)

1 nautical league equals 5,556,000 millimeters exactly.

1 nautical league = 5,556,000 millimeters

How to convert nautical leagues to millimeters

To convert nautical leagues to millimeters, multiply the number of nautical leagues by 5,556,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply millimeters by 1.799856012×10⁻⁷ (rounded).

millimeters = nautical leagues × 5,556,000

Example: 10 nautical leagues = 55,560,000 millimeters.

About these units

Nautical League (nlea)

NauticalHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

Three nautical miles (5.556 km). Used at sea; the title of Jules Verne's novel counts distance in these.

Jules Verne's 1870 novel title promises twenty thousand leagues beneath the sea, a number that would circle the planet several times over, and the unit behind it is worth unpacking. Leagues descend from a Celtic measure that Rome took over as the leuga, supposedly about what a person could walk in an hour. Seafaring nations later adapted the word to the water, where distance was reckoned from the sea rather than from the road.

At sea, English usage made a league three nautical miles. With the international nautical mile fixed at exactly 1,852 m by a hydrographic conference at Monaco in 1929, that gives 5,556 m, the figure used here, or 5.556 km. It equals thirty cables and covers three minutes of latitude. Earlier national nautical miles differed a little, and Portugal and Spain defined maritime leagues from fractions of a degree of meridian, so values near 5.5 to 6.2 km turn up in older texts. Verne's league was a French unit, a metric one of 4,000 m having been legal in France from 1812 to 1840, and the nautical league is now only historical.

1 nautical league = 5,556 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: League (unit); Wikipedia: Nautical mile

Millimeter (mm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One thousandth of a meter. Used in engineering, manufacturing and rainfall measurement.

Carl Friedrich Gauss put the millimeter at the base of his 1832 proposal for absolute units, pairing it with the milligram and the second, although the centimeter-based CGS system later won out among scientists. The name combines the metric prefix milli-, from the Latin for one thousand, with the meter. Since 1983 a millimeter has been tied to the speed of light: it is the distance light covers in 1/299,792,458,000 of a second.

Millimeters are the language of fine mechanical work. Standard rulers are divided into them, digital calipers commonly read to 0.01 mm, and mechanical pencil leads come in 0.5 and 0.7 mm. Copy paper is about 0.1 mm thick, and a thin hair, at 0.02 to 0.04 mm across, is close to the smallest thing the naked eye can see. A wave with a frequency of 300 GHz has a wavelength of 1 mm. An inch is exactly 25.4 mm. One trap for readers in the United States is that mil there traditionally means a thousandth of an inch, not a millimeter.

1 millimeter = 0.001 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Millimetre; Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Related conversions

See all length units.