Span

Medieval EnglishHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

9 inches (22.86 cm), the distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger of a spread hand.

1 span = 0.2286 meters (exactly).

About the span

Stretch your fingers as wide as they go and the gap from thumb tip to little fingertip is a span. The English word descends from Old English spann and a Proto-Germanic form meaning handbreadth, itself tied to a root meaning to stretch. Greek writers had spithame, which appears in Herodotus in the 5th century BC, and Hesiod used a word meaning three spans long three centuries earlier. Ancient systems treated the span as half a cubit, or three palms.

The English handspan is 9 inches, or 22.86 cm, and Wiktionary notes it as an eighth of a fathom. That is the figure used here, though a hand's reach differs from person to person and other countries' spans differ too: about 23 cm for a Slovenian great span, 17.8 cm for the Russian piad, and 15 to 20 cm in Chinese usage. A little or short span, from thumb to index finger, was much smaller. The unit is now mostly a figure of speech, as in the span of a bridge or of a wing.

Sources: Wikipedia: Span (unit); Wiktionary: span

Span conversion chart

1 span expressed in every other length unit:

More Medieval English units

• barleycorn (length)
• palm (length)
• cubit (length)
• ell (length)
• rood (area)
• oxgang (area)
• virgate (area)
• hide (area)
• moment (time)
• baker's dozen (counting & quantity)
• small gross (counting & quantity)

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