Palms to Centimeters (palm to cm)

1 palm equals 7.62 centimeters exactly.

1 palm = 7.62 centimeters

How to convert palms to centimeters

To convert palms to centimeters, multiply the number of palms by 7.62. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply centimeters by 0.1312335958 (rounded).

centimeters = palms × 7.62

Example: 10 palms = 76.2 centimeters.

About these units

Palm (palm)

Medieval EnglishHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

3 inches (7.62 cm), about the breadth of a hand without the thumb. One of the oldest body-based units, used in many cultures with values of roughly 7 to 9 cm.

Open a hand flat and the part below the fingers gives the palm its name, which came through Old French from Latin palma, a word tied to a root meaning flat. As a measure it was the width of four fingers. Egyptian cubit-rods mark palms of about 7.5 cm from the reign of Djer in the First Dynasty, and Greek, Roman and Israelite palms fell between about 6.7 and 8.8 cm. In those systems three palms made a span and six a cubit.

In England the palm is given as 3 inches, or 7.62 cm, the figure used here, but the evidence is tangled, since the four-inch hand was sometimes confused with it and Wiktionary even glosses the English palm as four inches. Medieval Italy, France and Iberia used a much longer palm descended from the Roman greater palm, around 24.6 to 24.8 cm, while Morocco's was about 18.2 cm. The palm was left out of Britain's Weights and Measures Act of 1824 and is not a US customary unit.

1 palm = 0.0762 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Palm (unit); Wikipedia: Hand (unit); Wiktionary: palm

Centimeter (cm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One hundredth of a meter. Used for body measurements, clothing and everyday objects.

Scientists, rather than shopkeepers, gave the centimeter its place. In 1832 Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed a system of absolute units built on length, mass and time, choosing the millimeter, milligram and second. In 1873 a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, whose members included James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), recommended the centimeter, gram and second instead. That CGS system dominated physics for decades, until the metre-kilogram-second system replaced it in the mid-twentieth century and led to SI.

CGS units proved awkward for rooms and buildings, which run to hundreds of centimeters, but the centimeter itself never went away. It is still the everyday unit for height, clothing and small objects, and it appears in map scales and rainfall reports. An adult fingernail is roughly one centimeter wide, and a milliliter is defined as exactly one cubic centimeter. An inch is exactly 2.54 centimeters. The CGS system itself survives mainly in theoretical physics and astrophysics, where Gaussian units are still common.

1 centimeter = 0.01 meters (exactly).

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

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