Roman Feet to Millimeters (pes to mm)

1 Roman foot equals 296 millimeters exactly.

1 Roman foot = 296 millimeters

How to convert Roman feet to millimeters

To convert Roman feet to millimeters, multiply the number of Roman feet by 296. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply millimeters by 0.003378378378 (rounded).

millimeters = Roman feet × 296

Example: 10 Roman feet = 2,960 millimeters.

Approximate value. Standards for the Roman foot varied by place and period, so this converter uses the most commonly cited value. Treat results as estimates, not exact figures.

About these units

Roman Foot (pes)

Ancient RomanHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)Approximate value

The basic Roman unit of length, about 29.6 cm (11.65 in). Surviving rulers vary by a few millimeters, so values differ slightly between sources.

Latin pes, the word for the human foot, named the basic length of Roman building, surveying and road making. The accepted modern value is about 296 mm, and the figure used here is 296 mm. Surviving evidence does not agree to the millimeter. In 1639 the English scholar John Greaves compared monuments and objects in Rome and got 295 mm from a statue of Cossutius, 296 mm from the tomb of Statilius, and 301 mm from a congius vessel of Vespasian. William Smith later gave about 295.9 mm.

The foot could be divided into 12 unciae, or inches, or into 16 digiti, or fingers, a split borrowed from the Greek pous. Larger units were built from it, including the cubit at one and a half feet, the pace at five feet and the mile at 5,000 feet. A longer provincial foot, the pes Drusianus, measured roughly 333 to 335 mm. The English foot, about 304.8 mm, is close to the Roman one but about 3 percent longer.

1 Roman foot = 0.296 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Pes (unit); Wikipedia: Ancient Roman units of measurement

Millimeter (mm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One thousandth of a meter. Used in engineering, manufacturing and rainfall measurement.

Carl Friedrich Gauss put the millimeter at the base of his 1832 proposal for absolute units, pairing it with the milligram and the second, although the centimeter-based CGS system later won out among scientists. The name combines the metric prefix milli-, from the Latin for one thousand, with the meter. Since 1983 a millimeter has been tied to the speed of light: it is the distance light covers in 1/299,792,458,000 of a second.

Millimeters are the language of fine mechanical work. Standard rulers are divided into them, digital calipers commonly read to 0.01 mm, and mechanical pencil leads come in 0.5 and 0.7 mm. Copy paper is about 0.1 mm thick, and a thin hair, at 0.02 to 0.04 mm across, is close to the smallest thing the naked eye can see. A wave with a frequency of 300 GHz has a wavelength of 1 mm. An inch is exactly 25.4 mm. One trap for readers in the United States is that mil there traditionally means a thousandth of an inch, not a millimeter.

1 millimeter = 0.001 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Millimetre; Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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