Palms to Meters (palm to m)

1 palm equals 0.0762 meters exactly.

1 palm = 0.0762 meters

How to convert palms to meters

To convert palms to meters, multiply the number of palms by 0.0762. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 13.12335958 (rounded).

meters = palms × 0.0762

Example: 10 palms = 0.762 meters.

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

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

Related conversions

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