Vershoks to Yards (vershok to yd)

1 vershok equals 0.04861111111 yards (rounded).

1 vershok = 0.04861111111 yards

How to convert vershoks to yards

To convert vershoks to yards, multiply the number of vershoks by 0.04861111111. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply yards by 20.57142857 (rounded).

yards = vershoks × 0.04861111111

Example: 10 vershoks = 0.4861111111 yards.

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

Yard (yd)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

3 feet or 36 inches, exactly 0.9144 meters. Used for sports fields, fabric and short distances in the US and UK.

Yard descends from the Old English gerd or gyrd, meaning a branch, stave or measuring rod. It first appears in the late seventh-century laws of Ine of Wessex, though there it names a tax unit, the yardland. Around 959 to 963 King Edgar ordered that the measure held at Winchester be used throughout his realm, the earliest record of a prototype. A story that Henry I fixed the yard as the distance from his nose to his thumb is later folklore, and the true origin, whether pace, cubit or waist, remains speculative.

Britain defined the Imperial Standard Yard in 1824 as the distance between two marks on a brass rod at 62 degrees Fahrenheit. A fire in 1834 damaged the standard, a replacement was made in 1845, and the Weights and Measures Act 1855 recognized it. The 1959 international agreement then fixed the yard at exactly 0.9144 meter. Today it measures American and Canadian football fields, association football pitches and cricket pitches, appears on UK road signs for short distances, and is still used to sell fabric in the US and UK.

1 yard = 0.9144 meters (exactly).

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

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