Kilometre

A kilometre (American spelling: kilometer, symbol: km) is a unit of length equal to 1000 metres (from the Greek words khilia = thousand and metro = count/measure). It is approximately equal to 0.621 miles, 1094 yards or 3281 feet.

Slang terms for kilometre include "klick" (sometimes spelt "click" or "klik" ) and "kay". All these slang terms can also refer to kilometres per hour.

Unicode has symbols for "km" (㎞), for square kilometre (㎢) and for cubic kilometre (㎦); however, they are useful only in CJK texts, where they are equal in size to one Chinese character.

hectometre << kilometre << megametre

Pronunciation

The kilometer is the only unit in the metric system with an SI prefix with second-syllable stress (kih-LAH-muh-tur).

See also

• 1 E3 m
• SI
• SI prefix
• Orders of magnitude
• light year
• parsec