Prahar to Minutes (prahar to min)

1 prahar equals 180 minutes exactly.

1 prahar = 180 minutes

How to convert prahar to minutes

To convert prahar to minutes, multiply the number of prahar by 180. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply minutes by 0.005555555556 (rounded).

minutes = prahar × 180

Example: 10 prahar = 1,800 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

Prahar (prahar)

Indian subcontinentHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

Three hours: an eighth of a day. Traditional South Asian watches of the day and night.

Hindi speakers still say dopahar for afternoon, literally two prahars, and Bengali has the related dui-pohor. The Sanskrit prahara divides the day and night into eight watches, four starting at sunrise and four at sunset. In the standard model each lasts about three hours, though traditionally the length followed the real sunrise and sunset, so day watches were longer in summer and night watches longer in winter.

A nineteenth-century note cited by Wikipedia puts northern India's day prahars at roughly 3.5 hours near the summer solstice and 2.5 hours in winter. The figure used here is the fixed three-hour watch. Four prahars correspond to fifteen muhurtas, but the two systems agree only at sunrise and sunset, since a muhurta is a fixed 48 minutes.

Prahars matter in Indian classical music, where each raga is prescribed for a particular watch. The link between raga and time is already in Narada's Sangita Makaranda, dated between the 7th and 11th centuries, and Wikipedia argues the idea is older than Bhatkhande, who died in 1936.

1 prahar = 10,800 seconds (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Prahara; 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

Related conversions

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