In today’s entry, we’re going to talk about length, width, and height as tools to find the dimensions of an object.
Length is a linear measurement, which means we can only use it to measure the distance separating two points.
In this case, we’ve measured the length between the tip of the cockpit and the back of the last coach.
However, the objects we use every day are not straight lines, so we can’t measure them in the same way. We need to use several different measurements to work out their dimensions.
For example, if we want to work out the dimensions of the sheet of paper inside this envelope, we need to measure two things: length and height.
We’ve taken two measurements from this envelope: length 16 cm and height 8 cm.
Two measurements are still not enough for the majority of the objects around us, because they are three-dimensional bodies. That means that we need three measurements, length, width, and height.
We’ve taken three measurements from this box: length 20 cm, width 10 cm, and height 15 cm.
Length, width, and height are measurements that allow us to indicate the volume of geometric bodies. The length (20 cm) and the width (10 cm) correspond to the horizontal dimension. On the other hand, the height (15 cm) refers to the vertical dimension.
We usually express these dimensions by writing them out separated by a multiplication sign. Therefore, when we go to buy a piece of furniture and we want to know its measurements, we can see the following on the box:
170 in (height) x 60 in (width) x 45 in (length)
I hope this entry has helped you learn how to measure the dimensions of objects in the world around you.
Don’t forget that you can register free with Smartick to do exercises involving units of measurement, how find LCM amongst many other things!
Learn More:
- Learn More about Measurements of Length
- Learn to Solve Measuring Problems
- The Concept of Length and How It’s Different from Distance
- Practice Length Measurement Problems
- Review of All Units of Measurements
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Great
Very interesting.
I’m confused in your example you put HxWxL as the usual way to express measuments, but if I go on a e-commerce website it’s usually listed as the opposite way round LxWxH. Are both forms used?
Nevermind. I just got confused over merchants changing the order. You can delete my replies.
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This helped me with my work thanks a lot 😍
Sorry for nit-picking ))) two typos that really confused my 6 yo son.
1) “Length, width, and height are adjectives”??
nouns maybe? For kids who just starting to identify parts of speech as part of their basic grammar curriculum, its really confusing,
2) “For example, if we want to work out the dimensions of the sheet of paper inside this envelope, we need to measure two longitudes: the height??? (length you mean, since you are about to introduce height only later on referring to 3-d shapes measurements vs. 2-d.) …
and yet next sentence we are back to length
“We’ve taken two measurements from this envelope: length 16 cm and width 8 cm”
Hi Ann!
Thank you so much for your comment and keen eye.
We have edited the post and hope that your little one finds it easier to understand. 🙂
agree much
Need more exercises for measurement.
I like this site
Very useful site, thanks.
Very useful to kids and adults also
very useful to kids and help to refresh the basics for adults like me
This really helped me
This website really helped me understand length, width, and height now i know thank you very much smartickmethod.com and its developers