Plural of meter; units of length in the metric system equal to approximately 3.28 feet, or devices that measure and display quantities. Also refers to rhythmic patterns in poetry.
From Greek 'metron' meaning 'measure.' The unit of length was defined by the French Academy of Sciences in 1791 as one ten-millionth of the distance from equator to North Pole. The measuring device sense developed in the 19th century, while the poetic meter meaning comes directly from Greek prosody.
The meter was originally intended to be a universal measurement based on the Earth itself, but the actual meter bar created in 1799 had a slight error in calculation. Today's meter is defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum in exactly 1/299,792,458 of a second - making it more precise than the planet that inspired it.
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