sazhen

Sazhen, or sажень in Cyrillic, is a historical unit of length from the traditional Russian system of measures. It was commonly defined as three arshins, with one arshin equal to about 0.7112 meters, giving a sazhen of approximately 2.1336 meters (roughly 7 feet). The exact value varied by region, but the three-arshin definition was standard in the Russian Empire.

Used in land measurement, construction, carpentry, and forestry, the sazhen served as a practical unit for describing plots, distances, and dimensions. In older texts, dimensions and distances are frequently expressed in sazhen and arshin rather than metric units.

The sazhen declined with the adoption of the metric system in the early 20th century, but it remains a topic of interest in historical studies and is occasionally encountered in translations of archived documents. In Russian culture and historiography, the term persists in references to pre-modern architecture and rural life, and it sometimes appears in idiomatic expressions or place-name etymologies that reflect its historical usage.