centimetre

UK/ˈsɛn.tɪ.miː.tə/

nounA2+Rare in speech; mostly a word you read · #13,634 of 15,258neutral

Other forms: centimetres

A centimetre is a hundredth of a metre. Ten centimetres, a centimetre wide, measured in centimetres.

It is the everyday metric length for anything hand-sized, and it is roughly the width of an adult fingernail. It is not an official SI unit in the strict sense, because SI prefers thousand-steps — millimetre and metre — but it is used everywhere anyway. Note the American spelling centimeter.

Definitions of centimetre

1nouncentimetreA hundredth of a metre.A2+
“The baby has grown three centimetres since her last check-up.”

centimetre is a unit of length.

Also accepted in games: centimeter

Where it comes from

French centimetre is centi-, a hundredth, from Latin centum, a hundred, plus metre.

French
centimètre
English, today
centimetre

French centimètre; equivalent to centi + metre.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practised in Numbers & Measurement

Practise this word

centimetre in the wild

Equivalently, there are 100 centimetres in 1 metre.
Centimetre
A centimetre is approximately the width of the fingernail of an average adult person.
Centimetre
An erg is the amount of work done by a force of one dyne exerted for a distance of one centimetre.
Erg (unit)
In the CGS base units, it is equal to one gram centimetre-squared per second-squared.
Erg (unit)
One gauss is defined as one maxwell per square centimetre.
Gauss (unit)

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From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

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