What Does the Term Knot Mean?

Video Transcript

"Hello, today we're talking about a knot. No, not the kind that you tie in a rope, but a knot as it refers to speed. And a knot is, first of all, based on a nautical mile. Now, a nautical mile's a little longer than a standard mile, as we know it, like you see traveling down the interstate and it says, "The next town is one or two miles away." A nautical mile is 1.15 regular miles as we know it, but a nautical mile was based on the circumference of the earth. You take the earth -- let's say, the circle of the equator -- you divide that into 360 degrees or 360 equal parts, and in-between each degree, you divide that up into minutes -- 60 of them. So now you've got...for every degree, you've got that divided into 60 parts. And what you come out with is one degree. Well, one nautical mile is one degree of measurement on that circle of the earth. Now, what a knot is is simply one nautical mile per hour. It's most commonly used in weather, and is also used for ships out at sea when they do almost all of their measurements in location based on latitude and longitude."