Spans to Centimeters (span to cm)

1 span equals 22.86 centimeters exactly.

1 span = 22.86 centimeters

How to convert spans to centimeters

To convert spans to centimeters, multiply the number of spans by 22.86. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply centimeters by 0.04374453193 (rounded).

centimeters = spans × 22.86

Example: 10 spans = 228.6 centimeters.

About these units

Span (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.

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.

1 span = 0.2286 meters (exactly).

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

Centimeter (cm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One hundredth of a meter. Used for body measurements, clothing and everyday objects.

Scientists, rather than shopkeepers, gave the centimeter its place. In 1832 Carl Friedrich Gauss proposed a system of absolute units built on length, mass and time, choosing the millimeter, milligram and second. In 1873 a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, whose members included James Clerk Maxwell and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), recommended the centimeter, gram and second instead. That CGS system dominated physics for decades, until the metre-kilogram-second system replaced it in the mid-twentieth century and led to SI.

CGS units proved awkward for rooms and buildings, which run to hundreds of centimeters, but the centimeter itself never went away. It is still the everyday unit for height, clothing and small objects, and it appears in map scales and rainfall reports. An adult fingernail is roughly one centimeter wide, and a milliliter is defined as exactly one cubic centimeter. An inch is exactly 2.54 centimeters. The CGS system itself survives mainly in theoretical physics and astrophysics, where Gaussian units are still common.

1 centimeter = 0.01 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Centimetre-gram-second system of units; Wikipedia: Centimetre; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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