Stadia to Meters (stad to m)

1 stadion equals 192 meters exactly.

1 stadion = 192 meters

How to convert stadia to meters

To convert stadia to meters, multiply the number of stadia by 192. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.005208333333 (rounded).

meters = stadia × 192

Example: 10 stadia = 1,920 meters.

Approximate value. Standards for the stadion varied by place and period, so this converter uses the most commonly cited value. Treat results as estimates, not exact figures.

About these units

Stadion (stad)

Ancient GreekHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)Approximate value

The length of the footrace track at Olympia, about 192 m. Other Greek cities used slightly different stadia, from roughly 150 to 210 m.

From the Greek word stadion came the Latin stadium and the English stade, and eventually the stadium where athletes compete. It was the footrace track, and as a distance it was defined, according to Herodotus, as 600 Greek feet. Because the foot differed between cities, the stadion did too. The Olympic version is put at about 192 m, which one table describes as 200 Heracles steps, a proposal from Carl Lehmann-Haupt in 1929.

Estimates for other stadia show how loose the unit is. A figure near 185 m is the most common convergence for the Ptolemaic or Attic stadion, while Babylonian-Persian and Phoenician-Egyptian values reach about 196 and 209 m, and an itinerary stadion near 157 m has been argued for road distances. The overall range is roughly 150 to 210 m. The choice matters for judging Eratosthenes' measurement of the Earth. Eight stadia made a Roman mile, and the medieval stadium came to mean the furlong, about 201 m in modern terms.

1 stadion = 192 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Stadion (unit); Wikipedia: Ancient Greek units of measurement

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

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