The reed is a traditional unit of length, one of many that were in use before the metric system spread. One reed equals 2.7432 meters, so every conversion on this page starts from that single number.

Units like this were often based on the human body or on farm work, and their exact size varied from town to town until modern values were fixed. They turn up today in old documents, translations, and historical research, where converting reeds into meters makes the numbers readable again.