Vershoks to Inches (vershok to in)

1 vershok equals 1.75 inches exactly.

1 vershok = 1.75 inches

How to convert vershoks to inches

To convert vershoks to inches, multiply the number of vershoks by 1.75. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply inches by 0.5714285714 (rounded).

inches = vershoks × 1.75

Example: 10 vershoks = 17.5 inches.

About these units

Vershok (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.

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.

1 vershok = 0.04445 meters (exactly).

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

Inch (in)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

1/12 of a foot. Defined as exactly 25.4 millimeters since 1959, when the US and Commonwealth countries agreed a common international inch.

Latin uncia, meaning one-twelfth, is the root of both inch and ounce, and it passed into Old English as ynce. Roman measurers divided their foot into twelve unciae, and the English inch kept that twelfth. After 1066 an inch was reckoned as three barleycorns, and a 1324 statute attributed to Edward II spelled out the definition as three grains of barley, dry and round, placed end to end lengthwise. For centuries the inch was simply a twelfth of a foot, or a thirty-sixth of a yard, and the US and UK each kept their own copy of the standard yard.

Those copies differed slightly until the 1959 international agreement fixed the yard at exactly 0.9144 meter, which made the inch exactly 25.4 millimeters. The US adopted it in 1959 and the UK ratified it in 1963, effective 1964. Today the inch is still the customary unit in the United States and Canada, and the UK keeps it on road signs. Worldwide it also names display diagonals, wheel rims, tire codes and pipe sizes.

1 inch = 0.0254 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Inch; Wikipedia: Yard; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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