A carpenters' ruler with centimetre divisions

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.

The centimeter is the distance light travels through a vacuum in \frac{1}{29 979 245 800} second.

Equivalence to other units of length

1 centimetre is equal to:

• 0.01 metres, which can be represented by 1.00 E-2 m (1 metre is equal to 100 centimetres)
• about 0.393700787401575 inches (1 inch is equal to 2.54 centimetres exactly) ^[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 Canadian 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 useful only 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

• CJK Compatibility excerpt from The Unicode Standard, Version 4.4 and co-exterior users.

External links

• Screen-o-meter

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