Centimeters to Feet Converter

The centimeter is exactly one hundredth of a meter, written 0.01 m, and it is the unit most metric rulers and tape measures are marked in, with ten millimeters to one centimeter.

It appears on clothing labels, school rulers, rainfall reports and body measurements, and in medicine for wound sizes. A person's height is commonly recorded in centimeters on metric forms.

The factor between centimeters and inches is exact: one inch equals 2.54 centimeters. Results on this site are shown with up to six decimal places, so a value converted out and back can end one digit away.

The usual error is reading a millimeter figure as centimeters, which overstates a length tenfold, or treating square centimeters as if they scaled with centimeters rather than with their square.

Centimeters, millimeters and meters divide the same scale: millimeters suit engineering tolerances, centimeters suit height and clothing, and meters suit rooms and buildings. Choosing the wrong unit misplaces the decimal point by ten or a hundred, so the label matters as much as the figure.

The foot is exactly 0.3048 meters, or twelve inches. United States survey work has used a separate survey foot, defined as 1200/3937 meters and equal to about 0.3048006 meters.

Aviation uses feet for altitude and flight levels worldwide, even in countries that measure road distance in kilometers. Building heights, room dimensions, timber and, in some places, body height are also quoted in feet.

The metric conversion is exact, since the foot is defined as 0.3048 meters, and the reverse is exact too. A displayed result is rounded to six decimal places at most, so a round trip can differ in the final digit.

The common slip is assuming a foot is close to a third of a meter when it is slightly longer, so rough mental division undershoots. Feet also belong to length, while square feet measure area and cubic feet measure volume.

The foot competes with the meter for height and building dimensions and with the inch for small spans. Because one meter is a little over three feet, treating a meter figure as feet overstates a dimension more than threefold.