Yards to Spans (yd to span)

1 yard equals 4 spans exactly.

1 yard = 4 spans

How to convert yards to spans

To convert yards to spans, multiply the number of yards by 4. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply spans by 0.25.

spans = yards × 4

Example: 10 yards = 40 spans.

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

Span (span)

Medieval EnglishHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

9 inches (22.86 cm), the distance from the tip of the thumb to the tip of the little finger of a spread hand.

Stretch your fingers as wide as they go and the gap from thumb tip to little fingertip is a span. The English word descends from Old English spann and a Proto-Germanic form meaning handbreadth, itself tied to a root meaning to stretch. Greek writers had spithame, which appears in Herodotus in the 5th century BC, and Hesiod used a word meaning three spans long three centuries earlier. Ancient systems treated the span as half a cubit, or three palms.

The English handspan is 9 inches, or 22.86 cm, and Wiktionary notes it as an eighth of a fathom. That is the figure used here, though a hand's reach differs from person to person and other countries' spans differ too: about 23 cm for a Slovenian great span, 17.8 cm for the Russian piad, and 15 to 20 cm in Chinese usage. A little or short span, from thumb to index finger, was much smaller. The unit is now mostly a figure of speech, as in the span of a bridge or of a wing.

1 span = 0.2286 meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Span (unit); Wiktionary: span

Related conversions

See all length units.