How do you convert inches to feet?
Divide by 12. 30 inches is 2.5 feet and 72 inches is 6 feet.
The awkward bit is the leftover. 70 inches divided by 12 is 5.833 ft, but nobody says their height like that – take the 5 whole feet (60 inches) and what's left over is 10 inches, so 5 ft 10 in.
Decimal feet do turn up on survey drawings in the US. Everyone else sticks to feet and inches and quietly argues about it.
What are inches?
Inches are mainly used in the United States as well as sometimes in the United Kingdom.
An inch is 1/12th of a foot, or exactly 2.54 centimeters. It is divided into fractions rather than decimals – halves, quarters, eighths – so a new pencil is about 7½ inches rather than 7.5.
To convert inches to centimeters multiply by 2.54, so 100 inches is 254 centimeters. To convert centimeters to inches divide by 2.54, so 50 centimeters is about 19.69 inches.
What is a foot?
A foot is 12 inches. The name comes from the human foot, which was the original reference, though few real feet measure a full foot.
Every region once had its own foot, and they differed by several centimeters. The foot was fixed at exactly 0.3048 meters in 1959, under an agreement between the US, the UK and other Commonwealth countries.
Heights of people are quoted in feet and inches in the US and UK, and aircraft altitude is in feet nearly everywhere, even in otherwise metric countries. To convert, multiply feet by 0.3048 to get meters.