A meter is the basic unit of length or displacement in the International System of Units (SI). It has a variety of meanings in science and engineering. It is defined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second (3.33564095 x 10-9).
Originally, a meter was defined as one tenth-millionth of the distance as measured in a great circle over the earth's surface passing through Paris, France to the equator from the geographic north pole. It is usually abbreviated as "m" in measurements. One meter is equivalent to 39.97 inches or about three English feet and one foot is approximately 0.3048 meter.
The power of 10 prefix multipliers usually leads to the derivation of other distance units from the meters that are more convenient. One kilometer (km) is equal to 1000 meters, one centimeter (cm) is equal to 0.01 meters and one millimeter (mm) is made up of 0.001 meters.
These units are not only found in the non-scientific but also the scientific literature and are found in the realm of the science and engineering. The meter and its kin are also used to specify the wavelengths of the EM fields.
The term meter is used to refer to any instrument that measures the magnitude of a quantity and is in line with engineering applications as well as everyday use. A few examples include the ammeter used to measure electric current, Volume unit meter used in home audio systems and the kilowatt-hour meter that is used to measure the electrical energy that is consumed over a long period of time.
English-speaking nations use ‘Metre' as the spelling of the metric unit of length and most common in the United Kingdom. However, ‘Metre' is used in other countries such as the United States, Philippines, and Sweden. All variants of English spell measuring devices such as speedometer as ‘meter'. The primary difference is that meter is the American spelling and meter is the preferred anywhere else.
Meter was defined originally as one ten-millionth of the distance as measured in a great circle over the earth's surface passing through Paris, France, starting from the geographic North Pole to the equator. Researchers had miscalculated the flattening of the earth because of its rotation which resulted to the first prototype being short by 0.2 millimeters.
The definition of the meter based upon a wavelength of the Krypton-86 radiation replaced the definition that was based on the artifact international prototype of platinum-iridium.
Meters to Inches converter tool for reference.
