How do you convert feet to centimeters?
A foot is exactly 30.48 cm, so multiply by 30.48. No rounding needed, since the foot is defined as 0.3048 m.
6 feet is 182.88 cm. Heights usually come as feet and inches, so do the inches separately at 2.54 cm each: 5 ft 10 in is 152.4 + 25.4 = 177.8 cm.
For a quick guess, call a foot 30 cm and you'll come in about 1.6% low – near enough for a bookshelf, but give the doctor the proper figure.
What is a foot?
The foot is an imperial and US unit of length equal to 12 inches, or exactly 30.48 centimeters. It is a third of a yard and 1/5,280 of a mile.
The foot began as the length of a human foot, and so differed from place to place and from person to person. The modern international foot was fixed at exactly 0.3048 meters by agreement in 1959.
People's height is given in feet and inches in the US and UK, and aircraft altitude is given in feet nearly everywhere, metric countries included.
What is a centimeter?
A centimeter (cm) is one hundredth of a meter and just under four tenths of an inch (0.3937 inches). The prefix comes from the Latin centum, a hundred.
Divide centimeters by 30.48 to get feet, or multiply feet by 30.48 to get centimeters. The factor is exact, as a foot is 30.48cm, and a single centimeter is about 0.0328 feet.
The centimeter was the base unit of length in the CGS (centimeter, gram, second) system that physicists used before SI, which is why older physics talks about dynes and ergs.