Palms to Kilometers (palm to km)

1 palm equals 0.0000762 kilometers exactly.

1 palm = 0.0000762 kilometers

How to convert palms to kilometers

To convert palms to kilometers, multiply the number of palms by 0.0000762. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply kilometers by 13,123.35958 (rounded).

kilometers = palms × 0.0000762

Example: 10 palms = 0.000762 kilometers.

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

Kilometer (km)

Metric (SI)Current unit

1,000 meters. The standard unit for road distances in most countries.

A name for 1,000 meters took a while to settle. In 1793 France's National Convention made the metre the sole French unit of length, and the first proposed name for the thousand-metre multiple was millaire. Everyday French usage then leaned on the myriametre, 10,000 meters, well into the 1800s. The Netherlands adopted the kilometre in 1817, under the local name mijl, and made it the only official unit of that size in 1867. In 1935 the CIPM dropped the myria- prefix, which left the kilometre as the standard unit for road-scale distances.

Kilo- is the SI prefix for a thousand, and the kilometre is now the preferred unit for land distances in most of the world, with the United States, the United Kingdom and Liberia among those that still use the mile. One kilometre is about 0.621 mile. The main span of Lisbon's 25 de Abril Bridge, at 1.013 km, gives a sense of the scale. Even its pronunciation has been argued over: in 1970 Australia's Metric Conversion Board made stress on the first syllable official, although Prime Minister Gough Whitlam argued for stress on the second. Military slang in several countries calls it a klick.

1 kilometer = 1,000 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Kilometre; Wikipedia: Metric prefix; BIPM: history of the metre

Related conversions

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