Length Converter

The table below shows what 1 unit in each row equals in every other unit. Values are rounded to a reasonable number of decimal places for readability; the calculator above gives the full-precision result for any specific value.

Every length conversion works the same way: convert your starting value into meters first, using that unit's conversion factor, then divide by the conversion factor of the unit you want. Meters work as the shared reference point because every other unit's factor is already defined against it.

• Convert 5 feet to meters: 5 x 0.3048 = 1.524 m
• Convert 2 miles to kilometers: 2 x 1.609344 = 3.218688 km
• Convert 15 centimeters to inches: 15 / 2.54 = 5.9055 in
• Convert 3 yards to feet: 3 x 3 = 9 ft (yards and feet are both imperial, so this one skips the meters step)

The foot traces back to a real ancient standard: the earliest known reference is a statue of Gudea of Lagash from around 2575 BC in Sumer, and the unit was based loosely on the length of a human foot for thousands of years afterward. It was not formally fixed at exactly 12 inches until the 16th century in Britain, and today the international foot is defined as exactly 0.3048 meters.

The inch comes from the Latin word uncia, meaning one-twelfth, the same root that gives English the word ounce. For centuries it was informally described as the width of a man's thumb at the base of the nail rather than a fixed standard. Since the international yard and pound agreement in the 1950s, the inch has been defined as exactly 25.4 millimeters.

The yard has a genuinely strange origin story: it is said to have been defined by King Henry I of England as the distance from his nose to the tip of his outstretched thumb. The word itself comes from the Middle English yerd, meaning stick or rod. Since 1959, it has been standardized as exactly 0.9144 meters by international agreement.

The mile comes from the Latin mille passus, meaning a thousand paces, and a Roman mile equaled roughly 5,000 Roman feet, close to 4,860 modern feet. England used several different mile lengths over the centuries, including a medieval mile of 6,610 feet, before the modern statute mile of 5,280 feet was standardized.

The meter is by far the youngest of these units. It was defined during the French Revolution in the 1790s as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator, measured along a meridian through Paris, an attempt to base a unit of measurement on something fixed in nature rather than a body part or a king's word.

If you only need one specific conversion, these dedicated converters are faster to bookmark and share than picking units from a dropdown each time.

Unlike most standalone length converters, this one is free to embed directly on your own site with a single line of code, no coding experience required. It stays fully interactive for your visitors, updates instantly, and can be styled to match your site's colors and branding.