Is 5 ft 8 tall?
5 ft 8 in (172.7 cm) is taller than 59% of men worldwide, 28% of American men and 15% of Norwegian men. For women it is the 97th percentile worldwide.
5 ft 8 in by group
Men
Women
Percentile is the share of the group shorter than this height. “1 in X” counts the rarer side: people at or beyond this value above the median, at or under it below. Percentiles are estimated from a normal distribution with each group's mean and standard deviation.
What this means
- In a room of 100 men from around the world, about 41 would be taller than 5 ft 8 in and 59 shorter.
- Across the 186 countries in our data, 5 ft 8 in stands out most in Timor-Leste, where it is taller than 95% of men, and least in the Netherlands, where it is taller than 8%.
- For a woman, 5 ft 8 in is the 97th percentile worldwide. The global mean is 159.0 cm for women and 171.0 cm for men, a gap of 12.0 cm.
Questions
- Is 5 ft 8 tall for a man?
- 5 ft 8 in is taller than 59% of men worldwide, 28% of men in the United States and 15% of men in Norway. That is about average.
- Is 5 ft 8 tall for a woman?
- For women, 5 ft 8 in is the 97th percentile worldwide and the 91st percentile in the United States. The global mean for women is 159.0 cm (5 ft 3 in), so 5 ft 8 in is 13.7 cm above it.
- What is 5 ft 8 in cm?
- 5 ft 8 in is 172.7 cm, which rounds to 173 cm. One inch is exactly 2.54 cm, so 68 inches is 172.72 cm.
- How rare is 5 ft 8?
- Worldwide, about 1 in 2 men are at least 5 ft 8 in, and 1 in 30 women. In Norway it is 1 in 7 men, in the United States 1 in 4.
Source: NCD Risk Factor Collaboration, eLife 2016, mean height at 18 of adults born in 1996. Country SDs where published, otherwise the global SD. Percentiles on this page are our estimate from a normal distribution with the stated mean and SD.
Enter your height, pick a country, and see what share of men or women are shorter than you.
Measure your height