Yards to Twips (yd to twip)

1 yard equals 51,840 twips exactly.

1 yard = 51,840 twips

How to convert yards to twips

To convert yards to twips, multiply the number of yards by 51,840. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply twips by 0.00001929012346 (rounded).

twips = yards × 51,840

Example: 10 yards = 518,400 twips.

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

Twip (twip)

Typography & screenCurrent unit

1/20 of a point (1/1,440 inch). Used in the Rich Text Format specification and some software.

A contraction of twentieth of a point, the twip is a deliberately tiny unit meant for software that wants whole-number layout. Wikipedia gives it as 1/20 point, or 1/1440 inch, about 17.64 micrometers (0.01764 mm). That inch fraction only works if the point is the desktop publishing point of 1/72 inch, which is the definition the figure used here assumes.

Visual Basic 6 and earlier used twips as the default unit, and Microsoft's Rich Text Format uses them to exchange documents between platforms. OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice take it as their base length unit, and Symbian OS used it to scale bitmaps. Flash is a trap: its internal twips are really 1/20 of a logical pixel, which makes them three quarters of a true twip. Wikipedia's article also words the name two ways, as a twentieth of a point or of an inch point, and notes that it lacks citations.

1 twip = 0.00001763888889 meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Twip; Wikipedia: Point (typography)

Related conversions

See all length units.