Centimetre

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

1 centimetrec =
International units
0.01 m	10×10⁻⁶ km
10 mm	100×10⁶ Å
66.8459×10⁻¹⁵ AU	1.057×10⁻¹⁸ LY
US customary / Imperial units
0.3937 in	32.8084×10⁻³ ft
10.9361×10⁻³ yd	6.2137×10⁻⁶ mi

A centimetre (American spelling centimeter, symbol cm) is a unit of length that is equal to one hundredth of a metre, the current SI base unit of length. A centimetre is part of a metric system. It is the base unit in the centimetre-gram-second system of units. A corresponding unit of area is the square centimetre. A corresponding unit of volume is the cubic centimetre.

The centimetre is a now a non-standard factor, in that factors of 10³ are often preferred. However, it is practical unit of length for many everyday measurements. A centimetre is approximately the width of the fingernail of an adult person.

millimetre << centimetre << decimetre << metre << kilometre

1 Equivalence to other units of length
2 Uses of centimetre
3 Unicode symbols
4 See also
5 References

[edit] Equivalence to other units of length

1 centimetre is equal to:

0.01 metres, which can be represented by 1 E-2 m (1 metre is equal to 100 centimetres)
about 0.393700787401575 inches (1 inch is equal to 2.54 centimetres exactly)

1 cubic centimetre is equal to 1 millilitre, under the current SI system of units.

[edit] Uses of centimetre

In addition to its use in the measurement of length, the centimetre is used:

sometimes, to report the level of rainfall as measured by a rain gauge
in the CGS system, the centimetre is used to measure capacitance
in Canadian maps, centimeters are used to make conversions from map scale to real world scale(kilometers)