Roman Leagues to Meters (leuga to m)

1 Roman league equals 2,220 meters exactly.

1 Roman league = 2,220 meters

How to convert Roman leagues to meters

To convert Roman leagues to meters, multiply the number of Roman leagues by 2,220. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.0004504504505 (rounded).

meters = Roman leagues × 2,220

Example: 10 Roman leagues = 22,200 meters.

Approximate value. Standards for the Roman league 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 League (leuga)

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

One and a half Roman miles (7,500 Roman feet), about 2.22 km. Used in Gaul and later across the empire for longer distances.

Gaul, not Rome, gave this unit its name. The Latin leuga or leuca came from a Celtic measure of the Gauls that the Romans adopted, and it is the ancestor of the later European league. It may originally have approximated the distance a person could walk in an hour, though that is a suggestion rather than a documented definition.

In Roman terms it was fixed at one and a half Roman miles, or 7,500 Roman feet, which comes to about 2.22 km. Under Septimius Severus this Gallo-Roman league replaced the mile as the official road distance in the Gallic and Germanic provinces. Even so, its practical length varied by region and period, so 2,220 m is a convention based on the 296 mm foot rather than a measured constant.

Later leagues strayed far from the Roman original. Medieval and later values ran from about 2.2 km up to nearly 8 km, with the English league taken as three miles, the Spanish common league near 5.57 km, and a French metric lieue set at exactly 4 km in 1812. No country officially uses it now, though Jules Verne's famous title keeps the word familiar.

1 Roman league = 2,220 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: League (unit); Wikipedia: Roman units of measurement; Wikipedia: Roman mile

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

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