Sazhens to Meters (sazhen to m)

1 sazhen equals 2.1336 meters exactly.

1 sazhen = 2.1336 meters

How to convert sazhens to meters

To convert sazhens to meters, multiply the number of sazhens by 2.1336. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.4686914136 (rounded).

meters = sazhens × 2.1336

Example: 10 sazhens = 21.336 meters.

About these units

Sazhen (sazhen)

Russian (Imperial)Historical unit (no longer in standard use)

Exactly 7 feet (2.1336 m). The standard Russian fathom, defined by Peter the Great to match the English foot.

Russian builders, surveyors and rope makers measured with the sazhen, a word usually translated as fathom. In its Imperial form it was three arshins, or exactly seven English feet, giving the 2.1336 m used here. The English link comes from Peter the Great, who redefined the Russian units in terms of English inches and feet instead of replacing them.

Older and informal sazhens were looser. The swung sazhen was the span between the fingertips of outstretched arms, about 1.76 m, while the oblique sazhen, measured from a raised hand to the opposite foot, was 3.5 arshins or 2.4892 m. Land area was counted in square sazhens, and the treasury desyatina contained 2,400 of them.

Five hundred sazhens made a verst. Seven English feet is a convenient size to picture, since it is close to a tall doorway, and a sazhen equals about 2.13 m in metric terms.

1 sazhen = 2.1336 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Sazhen; Wikipedia: Obsolete Russian units of measurement

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

Related conversions

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