Minute (min)

Metric (SI)Current unit

60 seconds. Defined as one sixtieth of an hour.

1 minute = 60 seconds (exactly).

About the minute

Minute means small, not short. It comes from the Latin pars minuta prima, the first small part, produced when sixty-based division was applied to the hour. Al-Biruni is credited with dividing the hour into minutes, seconds, thirds and fourths around the year 1000, and Roger Bacon used the same scheme in 1267. For everyday life the minute needed hardware: Jost Bürgi is said to have made the first clock with a minute hand, for Tycho Brahe in 1577, and watches got minute hands only after Thomas Tompion's hairspring of 1675 made them accurate enough.

A minute is 60 seconds, exactly 1/60 of an hour, and the BIPM's SI Brochure is the reference for its symbol, min. Civil timekeeping can bend the rule: because of leap seconds, a UTC minute occasionally holds 61 seconds. A negative leap second would produce a 59-second minute, but that has never happened in more than 40 years. People use the minute for cooking, lectures and phone calls, and the same name serves for the arcminute, which is a sixtieth of a degree.

Sources: Wikipedia: Minute; BIPM: SI Brochure, 9th edition; NIST: the second and the SI redefinition

Minute conversion chart

1 minute expressed in every other time unit:

More Metric (SI) units

• second (time)
• millisecond (time)
• microsecond (time)
• nanosecond (time)
• hour (time)
• day (time)
• meter (length)
• kilometer (length)
• centimeter (length)
• millimeter (length)
• micrometer (length)
• nanometer (length)
• picometer (length)
• decimeter (length)
• hectometer (length)
• decameter (length)

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