Roman Stadia to Meters (stadium to m)
1 Roman stadium equals 185 meters exactly.
How to convert Roman stadia to meters
To convert Roman stadia to meters, multiply the number of Roman stadia by 185. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.005405405405 (rounded).
meters = Roman stadia × 185
Example: 10 Roman stadia = 1,850 meters.
Approximate value. Standards for the Roman stadium 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 Stadium (stadium)
125 paces or 625 Roman feet, about 185 m. One eighth of a Roman mile.
Borrowed from the Greek stadion, the Latin stadium named a racecourse length that Romans also used as a route unit. It was defined as 125 paces, or 625 Roman feet, and eight of them made one Roman mile. That puts it at about 185 m, the figure used here, and it is the ancestor of the medieval furlong, itself an eighth of a mile.
The Greek original is far less settled. By Herodotus a stadion was 600 Greek feet, but the foot varied across the Greek world, so historians propose anything from roughly 150 m to 210 m. Itinerary, Olympic, Attic and Persian versions have each been argued for, with figures near 157 m, 192 m, 185 m and 196 m respectively. The Roman value lines up with the Attic estimate rather than the others.
Because the Roman unit is defined through a foot of about 296 mm, any change to that foot changes the stadium too. Surveyors and geographers used the unit for road distances and for scaling the world, and today it survives mostly in the word stadium for a sports venue.
1 Roman stadium = 185 meters (approximately).
Sources: Wikipedia: Roman units of measurement; Wikipedia: Stadion (unit); Wikipedia: Roman mile
Meter (m)
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
Related conversions
- Meters to Roman stadia (reverse)
- Roman stadia to kilometers
- Roman stadia to centimeters
- Roman stadia to millimeters
- Roman stadia to inches
- Roman stadia to feet
- Roman stadia to yards
- Roman stadia to miles
- Kilometers to meters
- Centimeters to meters
- Millimeters to meters
- Inches to meters
- Feet to meters
- Yards to meters
- Miles to meters
- Micrometers to meters
- Nanometers to meters
- Nautical miles to meters
- Pixels (CSS) to meters
- Light-years to meters
See all length units.