Centimetre

A centimetre (American spelling centimeter, symbol cm) is a unit of length that is equal to one hundredth of a metre, the current SI base unit of length. A centimetre is part of a metric system. It is the base unit in the centimetre-gram-second system of units. A corresponding unit of area is the square centimetre. A corresponding unit of volume is the cubic centimetre.

The centimetre is a now a non-standard factor, in that factors of 10³ are often preferred. However, it is practical unit of length for many everyday measurements. A centimetre is approximately the width of the fingernail of an adult person.

millimetre << centimetre << decimetre << metre << kilometre

Equivalence to other units of length

1 centimetre is equal to:

• 0.01 metres, which can be represented by 1 E-2 m (1 metre is equal to 100 centimetres)
• about 0.393700787401575 inches (1 inch is equal to 2.54 centimetres exactly)

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
• in the CGS system, the centimetre is used to measure capacitance
• in Canadian maps, centimeters are used to make conversions from map scale to real world scale(kilometers)

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 useful only 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
• Conversion of units, for comparison with other units of length

References

• CJK Compatibility excerpt from The Unicode Standard, Version 4.1.

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