Centimetre

A centimetre (American spelling: centimeter, symbol cm) is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to one hundredth of a metre, which is the current SI base unit of length. Centi is the SI prefix for a factor of 10⁻².^[1] Hence a centimetre can be written as 10 × 10⁻³ m (engineering notation) or 1E−2 m (scientific E notation) — meaning 10 × 10¹ mm or 1 m/100 respectively,centimetre-gram-second system of units.

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.

1 centimetre

Equivalence to other units of length

A carpenters' ruler with centimetre divisions

1 centimetre is equal to:

• 0.01 metre, which can be represented by 1.00 E-2 m (1 metre is equal to 100 centimetres)
• about 0.393700787401575 inch (1 inch is equal to 2.54 centimetres) ^[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 maps, centimetres are used to make conversions from map scale to real world scale (kilometres)
• to represent second moment of areas (cm^4)

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 only useful 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.