Spans to Feet (span to ft)

1 span equals 0.75 feet exactly.

1 span = 0.75 feet

How to convert spans to feet

To convert spans to feet, multiply the number of spans by 0.75. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply feet by 1.333333333 (rounded).

feet = spans × 0.75

Example: 10 spans = 7.5 feet.

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

Foot (ft)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

12 inches. Defined as exactly 0.3048 meters. Still the standard unit for height, altitude in aviation and room dimensions in the US and UK.

Human anatomy supplied the idea: an adult foot is roughly 15 percent of body height. Ancient cultures turned that into standards, but not the same one. The Greek pous was about 302 mm, the standard Roman pes about 295.7 mm, and a Harappan foot of about 335 mm has been reported from the Indus Valley. Historically, a foot fell somewhere between about 250 and 335 mm. Charlemagne tried to standardize units around 790 with little lasting success, and in 1593 English law fixed the statute mile at 5,280 feet.

The modern foot dates from the 1959 International Yard and Pound Agreement, which defined the yard as exactly 0.9144 meter and so the foot as exactly 0.3048 meter; the UK adopted it on 1 January 1964. The US survey foot, defined in 1893 as 1200/3937 meter, was deprecated on 31 December 2022. Feet remain in everyday use for height and rooms in the US, and ISO shipping containers are defined in them. Aviation altitudes use them too: flight level 330 means 33,000 feet.

1 foot = 0.3048 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Foot (unit); Wikipedia: Mile; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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