Girish Mahajan (Editor)

Centimetre

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Unit system
  
metric

Symbol
  
cm

SI units
  
10 mm

Unit of
  
length

1 cm in ...
  
... is equal to ...

imperial & US system
  
~0.3937 in

Centimetre

A centimetre (international spelling as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures; symbol cm) or centimeter (American spelling) is a unit of length in the metric system, equal to one hundredth of a metre, centi being the SI prefix for a factor of  1⁄100. The centimetre was the base unit of length in the now deprecated centimetre–gram–second (CGS) system of units.

Contents

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 average adult person.

One 1 millilitre is defined as one cubic centimetre, under the SI system of units.

Other uses

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
  • in the CGS system, the centimetre is used to measure capacitance, where 1 cm of capacitance = 6988111300000000000♠1.113×10−12 farads
  • in maps, centimetres are used to make conversions from map scale to real world scale (kilometres)
  • to represent second moment of areas (cm4)
  • as the inverse of the kayser, a CGS unit, and thus a non-SI metric unit of wavenumber: 1 kayser = 1 wave per centimetre; or, more generally, (wavenumber in kaysers) = 1/(wavelength in centimetres). The SI unit of wavenumber is the inverse metre, m−1.

    • Unicode symbols

    For the purposes of compatibility with Chinese, Japanese and Korean (CJK) characters, Unicode has symbols for:

  • centimetre (㎝) – code 339D
  • square centimetre (㎠) – code 33A0
  • cubic centimetre (㎤) – code 33A4

    • They are mostly used only with East Asian fixed-width CJK fonts, because they are equal in size to one Chinese character.

    References

    Centimetre Wikipedia
    (Text) CC BY-SA


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