Centimeters to Yards 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 yard is exactly 0.9144 meters, three feet or thirty-six inches. It is a defined multiple of the meter, not an independent standard. Its value was fixed by the same international agreement that defined the foot and the inch.

Fabric, carpet and some flooring are still sold by the yard, and the chain and furlong used in land and horse racing are built from yards. American football is measured in yards.

Conversions run through the exact metric value, so a yard in meters is exactly 0.9144 and in centimeters exactly 91.44. Printed results are rounded, which can alter the final digit on a conversion there and back.

A yard is not a meter, though the two are close enough that a rough estimate will look plausible on fabric. Buyers who order yards and measure in meters can come up short.

A yard is three feet, a little less than a meter. Fabric is sold in yards in some markets and in meters in others, so a price per yard and a price per meter are not comparable, differing by about nine percent.