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This article relies largely or entirely upon a single source. Please help improve this article by introducing appropriate citations of additional sources. (November 2007) |
The acre is a unit of area in a number of different systems, including the imperial and U.S. customary systems. The most commonly used acres today are the international acre and, in the United States, the survey acre.
One international acre is equal 4046.8564224 m2. One U.S. survey acre is equal to 62,726,400,000⁄15,499,969 m2 = 4046.8726098 m2.
One acre comprises 4,840 square yards or 43,560 square feet[1] (which can be easily remembered as 44,000 square feet, less 1%). Because of alternative definitions of a yard or a foot, the exact size of an acre also varies slightly. Originally, an acre was a selion of land one furlong (660 ft) long and one chain (66 ft) wide; the measure appears to have begun as an approximation of the amount of land an ox could plow in one day. However, an acre is a measure of area, and has no particular width, length or shape.
The acre is often used to express areas of land. In the metric system, the hectare is commonly used for the same purpose. An acre is approximately 40% of a hectare.
One acre is 90.75 yards of a 53.33-yard-wide American football field. The full field, including the end zones, covers approximately 1.32 acres.
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In 1958, the United States and countries of the Commonwealth of Nations defined the length of the international yard to be 0.9144 meters.[2] Consequently, the international acre is exactly 4,046.8564224 square meters.
The United States survey acre is approximately 4,046.873 square meters; its exact value (404613,525,426⁄15,499,969 m²) is based on an inch defined by 1 meter = 39.37 inches exactly, as established by the Mendenhall Order.
1 international acre is equal to the following metric units:
1 United States survey acre is equal to:
1 acre (both variants) is equal to the following customary units:
1 international acre is equal to the following Indian unit:
The word "acre" is derived from Old English æcer (originally meaning "open field", cognate to west coast Norwegian language "ækre" and Swedish "åker", German Acker, Latin ager and Greek αγρος (agros).
The acre was approximately the amount of land tillable by one man behind an ox in one day. This explains one definition as the area of a rectangle with sides of length one chain and one furlong. A long narrow strip of land is more efficient to plough than a square plot, since the plough does not have to be turned so often. The word "furlong" itself derives from the fact that it is one furrow long.
Before the enactment of the metric system, many countries in Europe used their own official acres. These were differently sized in different countries, for instance, the historical French acre was 4,221 square metres, whereas in Germany as many variants of "acre" existed as there were German states.
Statutory values for the acre were enacted in England by acts of:
Historically, the size of farms and landed estates in the United Kingdom was usually expressed in acres (or acres, roods, and perches), even if the number of acres was so large that it might conveniently have been expressed in square miles. For example, a certain landowner might have been said to own 32,000 acres of land, not 50 square miles of land.
The customary acre was a measure of roughly similar size to the acre described above, but was subject to considerable carucates, virgates, bovates, nooks, and farundells orlocal variation. However, there were more ancient measures that were also farthingales. These may have been multiples of the customary acre, rather than the statute acre.