Square metre

The square metre (international spelling as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures) or square meter (American spelling) is the unit of area in the International System of Units (SI) with symbol m².^[1] It is the area of a square with sides one metre in length.

Adding and subtracting SI prefixes creates multiples and submultiples; however, as the unit is exponentiated, the quantities grow exponentially by the corresponding power of 10. For example, 1 kilometre is 10³ (one thousand) times the length of 1 metre, but 1 square kilometre is (10³)² (10⁶, one million) times the area of 1 square metre, and 1 cubic kilometre is (10³)³ (10⁹, one billion) cubic metres.

SI prefixes applied

The square metre may be used with all SI prefixes used with the metre.

Unicode characters

Unicode has several characters used to represent metric area units, but these are for compatibility with East Asian character encodings and are not meant to be used in new documents.^[2]

U+33A1 ㎡ SQUARE M SQUARED
U+33A2 ㎢ SQUARE KM SQUARED
U+3378 ㍸ SQUARE DM SQUARED
U+33A0 ㎠ SQUARE CM SQUARED
U+339F ㎟ SQUARE MM SQUARED

Instead, the Unicode superscript U+00B2 ² SUPERSCRIPT TWO can be used, as in m².

Conversions

One square metre is equal to:

0.000001 square kilometre (km²)
10000 square centimetres (cm²)
0.0001 hectares (ha)
0.001 decares (daa)
0.01 ares (a)
0.1 deciares (da)
1 centiare (ca)
0.000247105381 acres
0.0247105381 cents
1.195990 square yards
10.763911 square feet
1550.0031 square inches

Notes

^ David R. Lide, ed. (2010), "INTERNATIONAL SYSTEM OF UNITS", CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics (90th ed.)
^ Unicode Consortium (2019). "The Unicode Standard 12.0 – CJK Compatibility ❰ Range: 3300—33FF ❱" (PDF). Unicode.org. Retrieved May 24, 2019.

External links