Conversions
Length Converter
Enter a length in any unit to see it in all the others at once.
Worked example
A height of 180 cm in feet and inches
- 180 ÷ 2.54 = 70.87 in
- 70.87 ÷ 12 = 5.906 ft
- That is 5 ft 10.9 in
Where this goes wrong
Trusting a rounded factor through several steps
An inch is exactly 0.0254 metres, not roughly 0.025. The shortcut is invisible on a doorway and obvious across a building: over 100 metres it loses about 1.6 metres. Convert once, from the exact factor, rather than chaining approximations.
Questions
- How many centimetres are in an inch?
- Exactly 2.54. This is a definition rather than a measurement — the inch has been defined against the metre since 1959, so the figure never rounds.
- How do I write a height as feet and inches?
- Convert to inches, then divide by 12. The whole number is the feet and the remainder is the inches: 70.87 in is 5 ft with 10.87 in left over.
- Is a US foot the same as a UK foot?
- Yes. Both use the international foot of exactly 0.3048 m. The only exception is the US survey foot, retired in 2023, which differed by about 2 parts per million — irrelevant outside land surveying.