Furlongs Per Fortnight to Knots (fur/ftn to kn)

1 furlong per fortnight equals 0.0003232798519 knots (rounded).

1 furlong per fortnight = 0.0003232798519 knots

How to convert furlongs per fortnight to knots

To convert furlongs per fortnight to knots, multiply the number of furlongs per fortnight by 0.0003232798519. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply knots by 3,093.295156 (rounded).

knots = furlongs per fortnight × 0.0003232798519

Example: 10 furlongs per fortnight = 0.003232798519 knots.

About these units

Furlong Per Fortnight (fur/ftn)

Imperial (British)Traditional unit (still used in some regions)

About 0.000166 m/s. A joke unit made of two archaic units, a standard classroom example of a deliberately absurd speed.

Furlong per fortnight is a deliberately silly speed, made from two obsolete English units. Furlong combines Old English words for furrow and long, the distance a team of oxen could plough without resting, and it is now fixed at 201.168 m. Fortnight descends from Old English for fourteen nights and equals 1,209,600 seconds.

Dividing one by the other gives about 1.663 x 10^-4 m/s, or 0.1663 mm/s. That is nearly 1 cm/min and roughly the speed of the tip of a short minute hand. The unit belongs to the humorous FFF system and turns up in classroom examples of dimensional analysis. In it, the speed of light is about 1.8026 x 10^12 furlongs per fortnight, which checks against 299,792,458 divided by 1.663 x 10^-4.

1 furlong per fortnight = 0.0001663095238 meters per second (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: FFF system (furlong per fortnight); Wikipedia: Furlong; Wikipedia: Fortnight

Knot (kn)

NauticalCurrent unit

One nautical mile per hour, exactly 1.852 km/h. The unit of speed for ships, aircraft and wind.

Knots in a rope really were counted. Before the mid-nineteenth century, sailors threw a weighted wooden board, the chip, off the stern on a line called the log-line. The line carried knots at regular intervals, and a sailor counted how many passed through his fingers while another timed the run with a sandglass. William Bourne's A Regiment for the Sea, printed in 1574, is the first known description, and many ships spaced knots 8 fathoms, about 14.6 meters, apart with a glass of roughly half a minute.

Today a knot is one nautical mile per hour, exactly 1,852 meters per hour, about 1.151 mph or 0.514 m/s. A ship making 1 knot along a meridian covers about one minute of latitude per hour, which is why charts and the unit fit together. It is not an SI unit, and the symbol is kn, though kt is common in aviation. Saying knots per hour is wrong, since that would describe acceleration. The US moved civil aircraft standards to nautical miles and knots in 1969, and winds and currents are also quoted in them.

1 knot = 0.5144444444 meters per second (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Knot (unit); Wikipedia: Chip log; NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

Related conversions

See all speed units.