Convert Centimeters to Nautical Miles

About converting Centimeters to Nautical Miles

Centimeters (cm) and Nautical Miles (nmi) are both units of length, so converting between them is a single multiplication: multiply your Centimeters figure by 0.0000054. Ten Centimeters comes to 0.000054 Nautical Miles, and a hundred works out at 0.00054 Nautical Miles.

Rule of thumb: going from Centimeters to Nautical Miles divides, so the figure always shrinks — it takes about 185,200 Centimeters to make a single Nautical Mile. If your answer came out bigger, you have the conversion the wrong way round.

What is a Centimeter?

A centimeter is one hundredth of a meter. It is the everyday metric unit for body measurements, paper sizes, furniture and anything else you would reach for a ruler to check — small enough to be precise about a person’s height without resorting to decimals, large enough that you are not counting hundreds of them. Most of the world lists height in centimeters rather than feet and inches, so 180 cm is instantly readable as "about six foot" to a large part of the planet.

What is a Nautical Mile?

A nautical mile is exactly 1,852 meters, and unlike every other unit here it was chosen to mean something geographically: it is one minute of latitude, one sixtieth of a degree. That is enormously convenient at sea and in the air, because a navigator can read distance straight off a chart’s latitude scale with dividers and no arithmetic. It is also the parent of the knot — one nautical mile per hour — which is why ships and aircraft report speed in knots rather than km/h.

To put both in perspective: a standard credit card is 8.56 centimeters wide, while a nautical mile is one minute of latitude on any chart.

The converter above updates as you type, and the table lists common values for quick reference. Need the opposite direction? Use the Nautical Miles to Centimeters converter, or browse all Length converters.