Thou to Feet (thou to ft)
1 thou equals 0.00008333333333 feet (rounded).
How to convert thou to feet
To convert thou to feet, multiply the number of thou by 0.00008333333333. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply feet by 12,000.
feet = thou × 0.00008333333333
Example: 10 thou = 0.0008333333333 feet.
About these units
Thou (thou)
One thousandth of an inch (0.0254 mm), also called a mil. Used in machining, plastics and the thickness of films and wire.
Machinists say a part is out by a few thou, and the word is a clipping of thousandth, keeping only the first syllable. In North America the same length is often called a mil, which is easy to confuse with a millimetre in international drawings. One thou is a thousandth of an inch, which is exactly 0.0254 mm or 25.4 micrometres, so about 39 of them fit in a millimetre. The word is both singular and plural.
Joseph Whitworth pressed in 1857 for engineers to think in decimal thousandths instead of fractions of an inch, a habit that needed vernier calipers and micrometers to put into practice. Today the unit describes the thickness of paper, foil, wire, plastic sheet and paint films, with a plastic ID card about 30 thou thick. It also appears in older spark-plug gaps, gasket thicknesses and circuit-board geometry. For finer work, a tenth, meaning 0.0001 inch or 2.54 micrometres, is common, and gauge blocks are often given in millionths or in micrometres.
1 thou = 0.0000254 meters (exactly).
Sources: Wikipedia: Thou (unit); Wiktionary: thou
Foot (ft)
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
Related conversions
- Feet to thou (reverse)
- Thou to meters
- Thou to kilometers
- Thou to centimeters
- Thou to millimeters
- Thou to inches
- Thou to yards
- Thou to miles
- Meters to feet
- Kilometers to feet
- Centimeters to feet
- Millimeters to feet
- Inches to feet
- Yards to feet
- Miles to feet
- Micrometers to feet
- Nanometers to feet
- Nautical miles to feet
- Pixels (CSS) to feet
- Light-years to feet
See all length units.