Centimetre
Unit of length
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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; for instance, human height is commonly measured in centimetres. A centimetre is approximately the width of the fingernail of an average adult person.
Equivalence to other units of length
One millilitre is defined as one cubic centimetre, under the SI system of units.
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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 = 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 – U+339D ㎝ SQUARE CM
- square centimetre – U+33A0 ㎠ SQUARE CM SQUARED
- cubic centimetre – U+33A4 ㎤ SQUARE CM CUBED
These characters are each equal in size to one Chinese character and are typically used only with East Asian, fixed-width CJK fonts.