Number & MeasureGreek → English
Meter
/ˈmiːtər/noun
The SI base unit of length, or a device that measures something.
The Greek roots
μέτρον
métron
measure
Literally: “a measure”
Follow a root:μέτρον47 words
The story of the word
The French Academy chose mètre in 1791 for a unit defined as one ten-millionth of the distance from the equator to the North Pole, measured along the meridian through Paris. The survey was slightly off, so the original metre was about a fifth of a millimetre short. Poetic metre is the same Greek noun arriving centuries earlier by way of Latin, and the two senses have never merged.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1797
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
metricdiametersymmetrythermometer
In a sentence
The hall is eleven meters long, which is two short of what the plan promised.