Metre | Measurement - Encyclopedia Britannica

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metre measurement Ask Anything Homework Help Also known as: m, meter Written and fact-checked by Britannica Editors Encyclopaedia Britannica's editors oversee subject areas in which they have extensive knowledge, whether from years of experience gained by working on that content or via study for an advanced degree.... Britannica Editors Last updated Jan. 30, 2026 •History Britannica AI Ask Anything Table of Contents Table of Contents Ask Anything

metre (m), in measurement, fundamental unit of length in the metric system and in the International Systems of Units (SI). It is equal to approximately 39.37 inches in the British Imperial and United States Customary systems. The metre was historically defined by the French Academy of Sciences in 1791 as 1/10,000,000 of the quadrant of the Earth’s circumference running from the North Pole through Paris to the equator. The International Bureau of Weights and Measures in 1889 established the international prototype metre as the distance between two lines on a standard bar of 90 percent platinum and 10 percent iridium. By 1960 advances in the techniques of measuring light waves had made it possible to establish an accurate and easily reproducible standard independent of any physical artifact. In 1960 the metre was thus defined in the SI system as equal to 1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line in the spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum.

Also spelled: meter (Show more) Key People: Pierre Mechain (Show more) Related Topics: International System of Units length unit (Show more) See all related content

By the 1980s, advances in laser measurement techniques had yielded values for the speed of light in a vacuum of an unprecedented accuracy, and it was decided in 1983 by the General Conference on Weights and Measures that the accepted value for this constant would be exactly 299,792,458 metres per second. The metre is now thus defined as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.