Gulliver, a sea captain and a surgeon, ends up on the island of Lilliput, where people are only about 6 inches in height. Everything in the town is so small, he has to document everything in smaller units like inches and mm meaning millimeters (mm). Can you imagine measuring tiny things using units like yards or miles?

Millimeters (mm) – Length / Distance Conversions

Select a conversion type and the desired units. This table provides a summary of the Length or Distance QuickBooks units within their respective measurement systems. All content on this website, including dictionary, thesaurus, literature, geography, and other reference data is for informational purposes only. In Japanese typography, these square symbols are used for laying out unit symbols without distorting the grid layout of text characters.

Using a Metric Ruler

Also, for each time we move from left to right, we must divide the length by 10. A common shortening of millimetre in spoken English is “mil”. This can cause confusion since in the United States, “mil” traditionally means a thousandth of an inch.

• Therefore, there are one thousand millimetres in a metre.
• As we can see in the chart, from mm to cm, only one jump to the left is required.
• This table provides a summary of the Length or Distance units within their respective measurement systems.
• To reach m from mm, we must jump three places to the left.

Millimeter and Other Customary Units

• Select a conversion type and the desired units.
• We can use the conversion chart to convert 147.5 mm into cm.
• Then, add the remaining mm for the full length.
• The base unit for a millimeter is meter and the prefix is milli.
• Here, millimeters help us accurately express their length.
• The prefix milli is derived from the Latin mille meaning one thousand and is symbolized as m in the Metric System.
• A millimeter is usually the smallest unit you can measure using a regular ruler.

We have measures like meters and kilometers to express bigger distances, like the distance between two cities, the height of mountains, lengths of rivers, etc. However, the length of the wheat grain, the size of an ant, the thickness of a paper, etc., are some measures we find difficult to express in bigger units of measurement like meters. Here, millimeters help us accurately express their length. We can use the following conversion chart to convert millimeters into different metric units of length. Here’s a fun example to understand why small units are important.

Converting Other Measurements

In case you are wondering how to measure length https://www.bookstime.com/ in millimeters or how a length of a millimeter or 1 mm looks like, let’s check it out on a ruler. The base unit for a millimeter is meter and the prefix is milli. The prefix milli is derived from the Latin mille meaning one thousand and is symbolized as m in the Metric System. Milli denotes a factor of one thousandth (1/1000th) which means that there are 1,000 millimeters in a meter.

• Gulliver, a sea captain and a surgeon, ends up on the island of Lilliput, where people are only about 6 inches in height.
• We have to multiply the length by 10 every time we move from left to right.
• In Japanese typography, these square symbols are used for laying out unit symbols without distorting the grid layout of text characters.
• This can cause confusion since in the United States, “mil” traditionally means a thousandth of an inch.
• To measure in mm, hold a metric ruler against an object, count the number of whole cm of its length, and multiply by 10.
• We can use the following chart to find the approximate results for the conversion of customary units.