the.com/centimetre
The ruler's favorite unit — too small to brag, too big to ignore.
means A unit of length equal to one hundredth of a metre, used for measuring everything from pencils to waistlines.
from Built from Latin 'centum' (hundred) plus 'metre' itself, which traces back to Greek 'metron' (measure). The word rode in on the metric system, born in France in the 1790s when revolutionaries decided units of measure should be rational, decimal, and tied to the Earth itself — a metre was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. Slice that into a hundred pieces, and you get the centimetre: a small, practical fraction of a very grand idea.
- origin
- One hundredth of a meter, by definition
- everyday use
- Rulers, waist sizes, rainfall measurements worldwide
- usa exception
- Americans avoid it, cling to inches stubbornly
- fun fact
- A fingernail grows about one centimetre monthly