This giraffe is nearly five metres tall.

A metre (US spelling, meter) is the basic unit of length in the SI measurement system. The symbol for the metre is m. The first meaning (in the French Revolution) was one ten-millionth of the distance between the Earth's equator and the North Pole along the Paris meridian. The metre is now defined as the distance light travels in a vacuum in 1/299,792,458 of a second.