Shaku to Meters (shaku to m)

1 shaku equals 0.303030303 meters (rounded).

1 shaku = 0.303030303 meters

How to convert shaku to meters

To convert shaku to meters, multiply the number of shaku by 0.303030303. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply meters by 3.3.

meters = shaku × 0.303030303

Example: 10 shaku = 3.03030303 meters.

About these units

Shaku (shaku)

JapaneseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

The Japanese foot, defined as exactly 10/33 meter (about 30.3 cm). Still the basis of carpentry and building dimensions in Japan.

Shaku is the Japanese reading of the character for chi, the Chinese foot, which began as a hand span from thumb tip to fingertip. Japan adopted the Chinese measuring system around the year 701, and the shaku became its basic length, growing over the centuries to roughly a third of a meter.

Several versions coexisted. The ordinary carpenter's shaku, the kanejaku, was about 30.2 to 30.3 centimeters. A longer kujirajaku, used for cloth and said to have been marked on whale baleen, measured 125/330 meter, near 37.9 centimeters. A longer variant, the korai-shaku, was about 1.17 times the modern value, about 35.5 centimeters.

The Weights and Measures Act of 24 March 1891 ended the variation for the standard unit by defining it as exactly 10/33 meter, about 30.3 centimeters or 11.93 inches. Official use was banned in 1966, yet the shaku still sets building dimensions: a standard three shaku panel is rounded to 910 millimeters.

1 shaku = 0.303030303 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Shaku (unit); Wikipedia: Japanese units of measurement; Japanese Wikipedia: Shakkanho (尺貫法)

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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