Square metre
The square metre (international spelling as used by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures) or square meter (American spelling) is the SI derived unit of area with symbol m. 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 10 (one thousand) times the length of 1 metre, but 1 square kilometre is (10) (10, one million) times the area of 1 square metre , and 1 cubic kilometre is (10) (10, 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. Conversions. One square metre is equal to: