Rods to Feet (rd to ft)
1 rod equals 16.5 feet exactly.
How to convert rods to feet
To convert rods to feet, multiply the number of rods by 16.5. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply feet by 0.06060606061 (rounded).
feet = rods × 16.5
Example: 10 rods = 165 feet.
About these units
Rod (rd)
16.5 feet or 5.5 yards (5.0292 m), also called a pole or perch. A quarter of a chain; a basic unit of English land measurement.
Three names, rod, pole and perch, all describe the same stick. Perch comes from the Roman pertica, a ten-foot measuring pole of about 2.96 m, while rod and pole name the physical staff that farmers and surveyors carried. A statute from around the thirteenth or fourteenth century defined the perch as five and a half ells. In the thirteenth century English perches ranged from 18 to 24 feet, and a parliamentary report of 1820 still found lengths between 16.5 and 25 feet in local use.
The version that won out is 16.5 feet, or 5.5 yards, exactly 5.0292 m, which is the figure used here. It is a quarter of a chain, 40 to a furlong and 320 to a mile, and 160 square rods make an acre. Ireland kept a longer perch of 21 feet. The rod faded from legal use in the UK with metrication from 1965, but allotments are still measured in square poles, canoeists count portages in rods, and pipeline easements and US property descriptions still use it.
1 rod = 5.0292 meters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Rod (unit); NIST SP 811, Appendix B.8 (length conversion factors)
Foot (ft)
12 inches. Defined as exactly 0.3048 meters. Still the standard unit for height, altitude in aviation and room dimensions in the US and UK.
Human anatomy supplied the idea: an adult foot is roughly 15 percent of body height. Ancient cultures turned that into standards, but not the same one. The Greek pous was about 302 mm, the standard Roman pes about 295.7 mm, and a Harappan foot of about 335 mm has been reported from the Indus Valley. Historically, a foot fell somewhere between about 250 and 335 mm. Charlemagne tried to standardize units around 790 with little lasting success, and in 1593 English law fixed the statute mile at 5,280 feet.
The modern foot dates from the 1959 International Yard and Pound Agreement, which defined the yard as exactly 0.9144 meter and so the foot as exactly 0.3048 meter; the UK adopted it on 1 January 1964. The US survey foot, defined in 1893 as 1200/3937 meter, was deprecated on 31 December 2022. Feet remain in everyday use for height and rooms in the US, and ISO shipping containers are defined in them. Aviation altitudes use them too: flight level 330 means 33,000 feet.
1 foot = 0.3048 meters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Foot (unit); Wikipedia: Mile; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors
Related conversions
- Feet to rods (reverse)
- Rods to meters
- Rods to kilometers
- Rods to centimeters
- Rods to millimeters
- Rods to inches
- Rods to yards
- Rods to miles
- Meters to feet
- Kilometers to feet
- Centimeters to feet
- Millimeters to feet
- Inches to feet
- Yards to feet
- Miles to feet
- Micrometers to feet
- Nanometers to feet
- Nautical miles to feet
- Pixels (CSS) to feet
- Light-years to feet
See all length units.