Minute (min)
The minute is sixty seconds, and it is one of the most practical and universally recognized units of time in daily life. We schedule meetings in minutes, cook pasta for eight to twelve minutes, describe commute times in minutes, and measure exercise intensity in minutes per mile or kilometer. The minute is the smallest division displayed on most analog clocks and watches, and it is the unit that governs the rhythm of the workday. Despite not being an SI base unit, the minute is accepted for use with the SI and appears in technical contexts alongside seconds and hours throughout science and engineering.
Definition
One minute equals exactly 60 seconds. One hour contains exactly 60 minutes. One day contains exactly 1,440 minutes. One week contains exactly 10,080 minutes.
History
The division of the hour into sixty minutes traces directly to ancient Babylon and its base-60 number system, which was inherited by Greek astronomy and transmitted to medieval Europe through Arabic scholars. The word minute comes from the Latin pars minuta prima, meaning first small part, referring to the first division of the hour by sixty. The second, in turn, is the pars minuta secunda, the second small part. For most of history, minutes were a theoretical subdivision used by astronomers and mathematicians rather than a unit that ordinary people tracked. Mechanical clocks capable of reliably displaying minutes only became widespread in Europe in the late seventeenth century, when improvements in escapement mechanisms made clock accuracy sufficient to justify a minute hand. Before then, clocks typically showed only hours.
Common Uses
The minute structures most of modern scheduling and planning. Business meetings are booked in 30- or 60-minute slots. Recipes specify cooking times in minutes and seconds. Fitness training plans express intervals in minutes: a 5-minute warm-up, 20 minutes of cardio, 10 minutes of stretching. Public transport timetables in most of the world use minutes to describe frequency. In medicine, drug dosing intervals are often expressed in minutes for short-acting medications. In aviation, flight durations and fuel reserves are calculated in minutes. Speed is commonly expressed as minutes per kilometer or minutes per mile in running and cycling.
Did You Know? Facts About Minute
- The minute hand on a clock travels 360 degrees in 60 minutes, or 6 degrees per minute. The hour hand travels the same 360 degrees in 12 hours, or just 0.5 degrees per minute, meaning the hour hand moves twelve times more slowly than the minute hand.
- In one minute, the average adult heart beats about 60 to 100 times, the average person breathes 12 to 20 times, and the Earth rotates 0.25 degrees on its axis.
- The world record for the mile run is just under 4 minutes. When Roger Bannister first broke the 4-minute barrier in 1954, it was considered a near-impossible feat of human performance. Today, thousands of runners have done it.
- A minute of arc, also called an arcminute, is 1/60 of a degree of angle. It is the origin of the nautical mile: one nautical mile is the distance on the Earth's surface subtended by one arcminute of latitude, about 1,852 meters.
- Light travels approximately 17,987,547 kilometers in one minute, far enough to travel from Earth to the Moon and back more than 23 times.