Versts to Meters (verst to m)

1 verst equals 1,066.8 meters exactly.

1 verst = 1,066.8 meters

How to convert versts to meters

To convert versts to meters, multiply the number of versts by 1,066.8. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply meters by 0.0009373828271 (rounded).

meters = versts × 1,066.8

Example: 10 versts = 10,668 meters.

About these units

Verst (verst)

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

500 sazhens or 3,500 feet (1.0668 km). The standard Russian unit of distance before the metric system.

Travellers in Tsarist Russia read road distances in versts, a word often linked to the idea of a turn, as in the length of a furrow before a plough turns. The unit was long and not fixed: in the 17th century a verst counted 700 sazhens, about 1.49 km, and under Peter the Great it was cut to 500 sazhens.

That later verst is 3,500 English feet, or 1.0668 km, which is the figure used here. A border verst, used in land surveys, was twice as long. One English-language article lists the verst as 1,500 sazhens in a summary table, but its own metric and feet figures only work with 500, so the larger number appears to be a slip.

Finland kept its own virsta, defined in 1827 at 1,068.84 m, until metrication in the 1880s. In Russia, versts stayed on milestones and in novels well into the 20th century, and about 0.94 verst makes a kilometre.

1 verst = 1,066.8 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Verst; Wikipedia: Obsolete Russian 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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