Sazhens to Millimeters (sazhen to mm)

1 sazhen equals 2,133.6 millimeters exactly.

1 sazhen = 2,133.6 millimeters

How to convert sazhens to millimeters

To convert sazhens to millimeters, multiply the number of sazhens by 2,133.6. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply millimeters by 0.0004686914136 (rounded).

millimeters = sazhens × 2,133.6

Example: 10 sazhens = 21,336 millimeters.

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

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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