Muhurtas to Minutes (muhurta to min)

1 muhurta equals 48 minutes exactly.

1 muhurta = 48 minutes

How to convert muhurtas to minutes

To convert muhurtas to minutes, multiply the number of muhurtas by 48. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply minutes by 0.02083333333 (rounded).

minutes = muhurtas × 48

Example: 10 muhurtas = 480 minutes.

Months and years are not constant. This site uses the average Gregorian year of 365.2425 days, so one 'year' converts to 365.2425 days, not 365; use 'common year' for exactly 365 days.

About these units

Muhurta (muhurta)

Indian subcontinentHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

48 minutes (two ghati), one thirtieth of a day. A muhurta is an auspicious window used to pick the time of ceremonies.

Muhurta comes from Sanskrit and is explained as muhu, a moment, joined to rta, cosmic order, so the word points to the daily echo of the natural order. The Rigveda uses it only to mean a moment. Later Brahmana texts fixed it at one thirtieth of a day, or 48 minutes, and the Mahabharata states that thirty muhurtas make up a day and night.

The sources do not fully agree. One passage of the Shatapatha Brahmana gives a fifteenth of a day instead of a thirtieth, and Wikipedia says Svetambar Jain samayik vows use one or two muhurtas that it equates with forty minutes. The figure used here is the 48-minute muhurta, equal to two ghatis, and the Manusmriti builds it up from smaller steps of kala and kashtha.

In practice a muhurta is a window chosen by an astrologer as favourable for a wedding, a house entry or a new business. Wikipedia's table assumes a 6:00 sunrise and gives each of the thirty slots a quality, with the Brahma muhurta falling from 4:24 to 5:12 and regarded as good for yoga and meditation.

1 muhurta = 2,880 seconds (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Muhurta; Wikipedia: Hindu units of time

Minute (min)

Metric (SI)Current unit

60 seconds. Defined as one sixtieth of an hour.

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.

1 minute = 60 seconds (exactly).

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

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