Glossary entry (derived from question below)
English term
m
"m" can of course be used as the abbreviation for meter, but isn't it better to write it out? (unless it is a table or something like that)
Shouldn't it be written (e.g.) "The ship is 30 meters long" (and not "The ship is 30 m long"
Any opinions?
| 4 +4 | meter |
Juliana Moretto
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| 4 +6 | m or meter |
Jennifer Levey
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Jan 24, 2022 22:04: writeaway changed "Field" from "Law/Patents" to "Other"
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Responses
Brazil
MSc | 10y Agronomy Engineer Experience
Native in: Portuguese (Variant: Brazilian) 
Works in: English to Portuguese, Portuguese
meter
In tables or numeric texts like a math question ou technical text where you repeat it a lot, you use it abbreviated.
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Note added at 9 mins (2022-01-24 15:32:06 GMT)
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*or technical
| Thanks. That is what I was thinking; I just needed some support for this here... |
| agree |
Charlotte Fleming
: You could write it in full the first time with "(m)" after it, and use "m" for the rest of the text.
5 mins
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Thank you, Charlotte
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| agree |
ATIL KAYHAN
24 mins
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Thank you, ATIL
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| agree |
AllegroTrans
56 mins
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Thank you, AllegroTrans
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| agree |
philgoddard
1 hr
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Thank you, philgoddard
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Chile
Human-scale Globalization
Native in: English (Variant: British)
Works in: Spanish to English, French to English, English to Spanish, and 2 more.
m or meter
In a technical text - and especially if there are many occurrences of 'meter' - it is better to abbreviate to 'm'. The use of abbreviations is all the more helpful if the full name of the measurement unit is rather long and wordy, as for example 'Angstrom unit' ---> AU or kilowatt-hour -->kW-h
If, in contrast, the text is a novel about shipwrecked mariners, it would be better to write 'meters' in full; eg: 'the ship lay five fathoms down, just one hundred meters from the shore'.
Whatever you decide to do, you must do it consistently within the same text - and apply the same rule to all measurements (and perhaps other abbreviations as well).
| agree |
Tina Vonhof (X)
10 mins
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| agree |
Bashiqa
18 mins
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| agree |
Tony M
: I agree — you wouldn't want to write out 'kilowatts' or 'centimetres' every time, now would you? The only excpetion, perhaps, might be in a document that also uses 'miles' — but in that case, it's the 'mlles' that I would write out in full.
1 hr
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| agree |
Tomasso
: Small m, seems capitalized M is something else, https://usma.org/correct-si-metric-usage
12 hrs
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| agree |
Lara Barnett
20 hrs
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| agree |
Yvonne Gallagher
2 days 20 hrs
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Discussion
A final observation, as I said, I continue to agree that in technical, math, phisics or any "areas like that" texts, you can and should use "m".
"m" is an international recognized unit and is part of SI (is the length measurement international standard unit)
https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and-measures/metric-si/si-u...
but for texts not in these areas (that usually dont repeat units during the text), like in the example you gave, you should use meter.
"The mile has been variously abbreviated in English—with and without a trailing period—as mi, M, ml, and m.[4] The American National Institute of Standards and Technology now uses and recommends mi to avoid confusion with the SI metre (m) and millilitre (ml).[5] However, derived units such as miles per hour or miles per gallon continue to be abbreviated as mph and mpg rather than mi/h and mi/gal. In the United Kingdom, road signs use m as the abbreviation for mile though height and width restrictions also use m as the abbreviation for the metre, which may be displayed alongside feet and inches." https://en.wikipedia.org/Mile
One has to be super careful with international texts; texts that will be read in a wide variety of jurisdictions
Do you not have a reference style guide?
Have you try searching the Chicago and/or the MLA style manuals at all?