Sun to Meters (sun to m)

1 sun equals 0.0303030303 meters (rounded).

1 sun = 0.0303030303 meters

How to convert sun to meters

To convert sun to meters, multiply the number of sun by 0.0303030303. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply meters by 33.

meters = sun × 0.0303030303

Example: 10 sun = 0.303030303 meters.

About these units

Sun (sun)

JapaneseTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

One tenth of a shaku, about 3.03 cm. The Japanese 'inch', still used in carpentry.

Sun is the Japanese reading of the Chinese character for cun, the Chinese inch, which was traditionally the width of a person's thumb at the knuckle. Japan took the whole system over from China, and the sun kept its place as one tenth of the foot-like shaku.

Because the shaku was fixed in 1891 at 10/33 meter, the sun works out to 1/33 meter, about 30.3 millimeters or 1.19 inches. That makes it about 19 percent longer than a modern inch. Before the legal definition, the size drifted slightly between eras and regions, so older measurements in sun carry some uncertainty.

Smaller steps below it, such as the bu, divide it further. Today the sun survives mainly in carpentry, joinery and traditional crafts, where dimensions are still quoted in shaku and sun before being translated into the millimeters on modern rulers.

1 sun = 0.0303030303 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Cun (unit); Wikipedia: Shaku (unit); Wikipedia: Japanese 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

Related conversions

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