Centimetre
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| 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 in the metric system, equal to one hundredth of a metre, which is the current SI base unit of length. It can be written in scientific notations as 10×10-3 m (engineering notation) or 1 E-2 m (exponential notation) — meaning 10 × 1 mm or 1 m / 100 respectively. The centimetre is the base unit in the now deprecated centimetre-gram-second system of units.
The centimetre is a non-standard factor, in that factors of 103 are often preferred. However, it is a practical unit of length for many everyday measurements. A centimetre is approximately the width of the fingernail of an adult person.
nanometre <<< micrometre <<< millimetre < centimetre < decimetre < metre < decametre < hectometre < kilometre
Among known nicknames for the centimetre are 'chim' and 'c'.
Contents |
[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, centimetres are used to make conversions from map scale to real world scale (kilometres)
[edit] Unicode symbols
For the purposes of compatibility with Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) characters, Unicode has symbols for:
- centimetre (㎝) - code 339D
- square centimetre (㎠) - code 33A0
- cubic centimetre (㎤) - code 33A4
They are useful only with East Asian fixed-width CJK fonts, because they are equal in size to one Chinese character.
[edit] See also
- 1 E-2 m
- SI
- SI prefix
- Metric system
- Orders of magnitude (length)
- Conversion of units, for comparison with other units of length
