Centimetre
| SI units | |
|---|---|
| 10×10−3 m | 10 mm |
| US customary / Imperial units | |
| 32.81×10 |
0.39370 in |
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. Centi is the SI prefix for a factor of 10−2.[1] Hence a centimetre can be written as 10 × 10−3 m (engineering notation) or 1E−2 m (scientific E notation) — meaning 10 × 101 mm or 1 m/100 respectively,centimetre-gram-second system of units.
Though for many physical quantities, SI prefixes for factors of 103—like milli- and kilo-—are often preferred by technicians, the centimetre remains a practical unit of length for many everyday measurements. A centimetre is approximately the width of the fingernail of an adult person.
Contents |
Equivalence to other units of length
1 centimetre is equal to:
- 0.01 metre, which can be represented by 1.00 E-2 m (1 metre is equal to 100 centimetres)
- about 0.393700787401575 inch (1 inch is equal to 2.54 centimetres) [2]
1 cubic centimetre is equal to 1 millilitre, under the current SI system of units.
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 [3]
- in the CGS system, the centimetre is used to measure capacitance, where 1 cm of capacitance = 1.113×10 − 12 Farad [4]
- in maps, centimetres are used to make conversions from map scale to real world scale (kilometres)
Unicode symbols
For the purposes of compatibility with Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) characters, Unicode has symbols for: [5]
- centimetre (㎝) - code 339D
- square centimetre (㎠) - code 33A0
- cubic centimetre (㎤) - code 33A4
They are only useful with East Asian fixed-width CJK fonts, because they are equal in size to one Chinese character.
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
References
- ^ BIPM - SI prefixes
- ^ Inch - from Eric Weisstein's World of Physics
- ^ Rain Measurement, Rain Gauge, Wireless Rain Gauge, Rain Gage, Rain Gauge Data
- ^ Capacitance - from Eric Weisstein's World of Physics
- ^ [1] CJK Compatibility excerpt from The Unicode Standard, Version 4.1.
- CJK Compatibility excerpt from The Unicode Standard, Version 4.4 and co-exterior users.
|
|||||
stock | retire | vm
Why are we here?
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License
This page is cache of Wikipedia. History