Length

METER
We are learning about meter this time. K stands for kilometer. Kilo (K) means 1000, so kilometer means 1000 meters.
Definition of Meter
Meter is the international standard unit of length, approximately equivalent to 39.37 inches. It is as the distance traveled by light in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.

The metric system was invented in France inn 1790 by the French National Assembly directed the Academy of Sciences of Paris, to standardize the units of measurement. A committeee were the mathematicians Jean Charles de Borda, Joseph-Louis Comte de Lagrange, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Gaspard Monge, and Marie Jean Antoine Nicholas Caritat, the Marquis de Condorcet (1743-1794). They used a decimal system and defined the meter to be one 10-millionths of the distance from the equator to the Earth's Pole (that is, the Earth's circumference would be equal to 40 million meters).

The word meter itself comes from the Greek word metron, which means measure. The centimeter was defined as one-hundredth of a meter; the kilometer was defined as 1000 meters.

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/france.shtml
http://www.answers.com/topic/metre