Palms to Yards (palm to yd)

1 palm equals 0.08333333333 yards (rounded).

1 palm = 0.08333333333 yards

How to convert palms to yards

To convert palms to yards, multiply the number of palms by 0.08333333333. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply yards by 12.

yards = palms × 0.08333333333

Example: 10 palms = 0.8333333333 yards.

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

Yard (yd)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

3 feet or 36 inches, exactly 0.9144 meters. Used for sports fields, fabric and short distances in the US and UK.

Yard descends from the Old English gerd or gyrd, meaning a branch, stave or measuring rod. It first appears in the late seventh-century laws of Ine of Wessex, though there it names a tax unit, the yardland. Around 959 to 963 King Edgar ordered that the measure held at Winchester be used throughout his realm, the earliest record of a prototype. A story that Henry I fixed the yard as the distance from his nose to his thumb is later folklore, and the true origin, whether pace, cubit or waist, remains speculative.

Britain defined the Imperial Standard Yard in 1824 as the distance between two marks on a brass rod at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. A fire in 1834 damaged the standard, a replacement was made in 1845, and the Weights and Measures Act 1855 recognized it. The 1959 international agreement then fixed the yard at exactly 0.9144 meter. Today it measures American and Canadian football fields, association football pitches and cricket pitches, appears on UK road signs for short distances, and is still used to sell fabric in the US and UK.

1 yard = 0.9144 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Yard; Wikipedia: Inch; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Related conversions

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