Pieds Du Roi to Kilometers (pied to km)

1 pied du roi equals 0.000324839385 kilometers (rounded).

1 pied du roi = 0.000324839385 kilometers

How to convert pieds du roi to kilometers

To convert pieds du roi to kilometers, multiply the number of pieds du roi by 0.000324839385. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply kilometers by 3,078.444444 (rounded).

kilometers = pieds du roi × 0.000324839385

Example: 10 pieds du roi = 0.00324839385 kilometers.

About these units

Pied Du Roi (pied)

French (Ancien Régime)Historical unit (no longer in standard use)

The 'king's foot' of the French Ancien Régime, about 32.48 cm; 12 pouces. About 6.6% longer than the English foot.

King's foot is the literal meaning of the name, and the unit was reputed to descend, with little change, from the measures of Charlemagne, which in turn drew on Byzantine and Roman practice. For about a thousand years it stayed close to the same length, though the surviving standards disagree slightly: the foot of the old toise de l'Écritoire is given as 326.6 millimetres, against about 324.8 for the later royal foot.

The figure now used for the pied du roi is 4500/13853 metre, about 32.48 centimetres or 1.066 English feet. This ratio comes from the 1799 law that defined the metre in terms of the Toise of Peru. It was divided into 12 pouces and 144 lignes, while six pieds made one toise.

Wikipedia notes that its own sources vary on details of the standards. The iron toise at the Grand Châtelet was bent before 1668 and replaced by a bar roughly 0.5 percent shorter, which shows how much a nominally fixed unit could drift. Quebec's pied, still seen in land records, is about four parts per million smaller than the French original.

1 pied du roi = 0.324839385 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Pied du roi; Wikipedia: Toise; Wikipedia: Traditional French units of measurement

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

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