Yards to Picometers (yd to pm)

1 yard equals 914,400,000,000 picometers exactly.

1 yard = 914,400,000,000 picometers

How to convert yards to picometers

To convert yards to picometers, multiply the number of yards by 914,400,000,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply picometers by 1.093613298×10⁻¹² (rounded).

picometers = yards × 914,400,000,000

Example: 10 yards = 9,144,000,000,000 picometers.

About these units

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

Picometer (pm)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One trillionth of a meter. Atomic diameters are typically a few hundred pm.

One trillionth of a meter, the picometer (pm) is the SI length that sits below the nanometer and above the femtometer. It equals 0.01 angstrom, so a figure in angstroms converts by multiplying by 100. Wikipedia notes that the symbol mu-mu was once used for it, and the NIST list of SI prefixes gives pico as 10 to the power of minus 12.

In practice the unit belongs to chemistry and atomic physics, where distances between bonded atoms are expressed as a few hundred of them. A carbon to carbon single bond is about 154 pm long, and a helium atom is estimated at about 62 pm across, while atoms in general run from roughly 62 to 520 pm in diameter. Chemists who grew up with the angstrom increasingly quote the same distances in picometers, because the angstrom is no longer part of the SI. Gravitational-wave work pushes the scale further: the planned LISA detector is expected to resolve displacements of about 20 pm over a 2.5 million kilometer baseline.

1 picometer = 1×10⁻¹² meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Picometre; NIST: metric (SI) prefixes; Wikipedia: Angstrom

Related conversions

See all length units.