Knots to Meters Per Second (kn to m/s)

1 knot equals 0.5144444444 meters per second (rounded).

How to convert knots to meters per second

To convert knots to meters per second, multiply the number of knots by 0.5144444444. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply meters per second by 1.943844492 (rounded).

meters per second = knots × 0.5144444444

Example: 10 knots = 5.144444444 meters per second.

About these units

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

Meter Per Second (m/s)

Metric (SI)Current unit

The SI unit of speed. Walking pace is about 1.4 m/s; a sprinter reaches roughly 10 m/s.

Official standing arrived in 1960, when the CGPM established the SI and made the meter per second the unit for speed and velocity. Before that, feet per second, miles per hour and knots were more common, depending on region and trade. One proposal gave 1 m/s its own name, the benz, after Karl Benz, but it was rejected and never caught on, so the unit is still written as a plain ratio of meter to second.

The meter is now defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second, and the second by the vibration of caesium atoms, so the meter per second rests on two physical standards. Exactly 3.6 km/h make 1 m/s, and it equals about 2.2369 mph or 1.9438 knots. For scale, sound travels at about 343 m/s in dry air at 20 °C, and Chuck Yeager's Bell X-1 reached about 361 m/s, Mach 1.06, in October 1947. Physics and engineering use the unit almost exclusively.

The meter per second is the reference unit for speed on this site.

Sources: Wikipedia: Metre per second; NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition; Wikipedia: Sound barrier

Related conversions

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