Centimeter Per Second (cm/s)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One hundredth of a meter per second. Used for slow speeds, such as settling particles.

1 centimeter per second = 0.01 meters per second (exactly).

About the centimeter per second

Centimeter per second once had a formal name of its own. In 1888 a committee on mechanical nomenclature, reporting to the British Association meeting at Bath, proposed the kine for a speed of 1 cm/s, together with the bole for momentum and the barad for pressure. The trade press mocked the set, one journal calling it an abomination, and by 1913 the names had fallen out of use, so the plain compound unit survived instead.

Its natural territory is slow settling and drifting. Stokes' law gives the terminal speed of a small sphere sinking through a fluid, and that speed rises with the square of the particle radius, so fine particles fall far more slowly than coarse ones. One centimeter per second equals 0.01 m/s, or 0.036 km/h, which is a hundred times slower than the walking pace of 1 to 1.5 m/s, and it is 100 cm/s for each meter per second.

Sources: Wikipedia: Kine (unit); Wikipedia: Stokes' law; Wikipedia: Orders of magnitude (speed)

Centimeter Per Second conversion chart

1 centimeter per second expressed in every other speed unit:

More Metric (SI) units

• meter per second (speed)
• kilometer per hour (speed)
• millimeter per second (speed)
• kilometer per minute (speed)
• meter per minute (speed)
• meter (length)
• kilometer (length)
• centimeter (length)
• millimeter (length)
• micrometer (length)
• nanometer (length)
• picometer (length)
• decimeter (length)
• hectometer (length)
• decameter (length)
• kilogram (weight & mass)

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