Vershok

Russian (Imperial)Historical unit (no longer in standard use)

1.75 inches (4.445 cm), the Russian 'finger-breadth'. Sixteen vershoks make an arshin.

1 vershok = 0.04445 meters (exactly).

About the vershok

Vershok comes from a Russian word for a tip or top, and the unit was the smallest everyday step in the Russian system of body-derived lengths, roughly the breadth of the two upper joints of a finger. Tailors, carpenters and merchants counted heights and small dimensions in it, and it was usually quoted as the amount by which a person or an object stood above the next full arshin.

The figure used here is 4.445 cm, which is exactly one and three quarter English inches and one sixteenth of an arshin. That tidy fit is no accident: Peter the Great fixed the arshin at 28 English inches in the 18th century, so the vershok inherited an English-inch size. Five arshins therefore span 80 vershoks, or 140 inches.

The unit lingers in language. The proverb about a child being two vershoks above the pot, meaning very small, still turns up in Russian speech. Russia made the metric system optional in 1900 and compulsory in 1918, and the old units were formally replaced in the Soviet Union in 1925.

Sources: Wikipedia: Vershok; Wikipedia: Obsolete Russian units of measurement

Vershok conversion chart

1 vershok expressed in every other length unit:

More Russian (Imperial) units

• arshin (length)
• sazhen (length)
• verst (length)
• zolotnik (weight & mass)
• funt (Russian pound) (weight & mass)
• pood (weight & mass)
• charka (volume)
• shtof (volume)
• vedro (volume)

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