Talk:Acre

message: what is width of an acre in feet?
:1 yard = 3 feet, so, 220 yd by 22 yd = 660 by 66 feet.  Thus, 66 feet wide.  Nik42 08:04, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: If your "acre" is a rectangle, then its width is 43,560 ft² divided by the length in feet.  If that rectangle is a square, then each side is √(43,560 ft²), or about 208 ft 8½ in, the maximum width of a rectangular one-acre tract.  Gene Nygaard 16:15, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)

text: One perch by one furlong is a quarter of an acre.  Four perches by one furlong is one acre.  The pre-1593 mile was 5000 English feet, not Roman feet, so it was not the same as a Roman mile. Indefatigable 17:50, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  ACRE 

message: Think of one acre being slightly larger than 60m by 60m.
:On the topic of "simple", one should consider removing "which can be easily remembered" from the introduction. It looks ridiculous. One Ha = 100x100 is easy to remember, 43,560 being 1% less than 44,000 is not. jonatan (talk) 18:51, 19 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Acre - Make it simple 

message: It's interesting how the English and other Europeans seem to think they invented all measures from scratch but at the same time allow that by some coincidence the people who invented surveying were apparently able to lay out the metes and bounds of plots of land in essentially the same units several millenia earlier. How did the Greeks lay out their fields? Federal Street 16:14, 16 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  non english acres

message: The line
:One acre equals ten square chains: ten acres equals one square furlong: an acre is a chain by a furlong: chain: 22 yards, furlong: 220 yards.
appeared in two paragraphs.  I removed it from the first, thinking it more relevant in its place in the second.--King Hildebrand 17:11, 2 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Duplication 

message: There is some confusion in this section, which starts by saying that the US and the Commonwealth agreed on the length of a yard, in meters.  It then says there is some difference between the US and International acres, which makes no sense.  The next section talks about a US survey acre.  If this is the acre being referred to under International Acre, perhaps "survey acre" could be appended to "US" or the two sections could be combined to be more coherent.Cellmaker (talk) 14:47, 7 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  International Acre 

message: Has anyone noticed that an acre is one-tenth of a square furlong? Or is that just another wacky measurement? ZtObOr 02:21, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: It isn't wacky. An rectangle that is one furlong on the long edge (660 feet) and one chain on the short edge (66 feet) is an acre. A chain is 1/10 of a furlong. So naturally 10 such rectangles, placed with their long sides touching, would have an area of 10 acres and would form a square with each edge being one furlong long. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 02:33, 17 December 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Right. Never mind then. ZtObOr 23:04, 18 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Another derivation of an acre 

message: User:ArthurDuhurst added the following sentence: "Curiously, both distances, 660 ft. & 66 ft., are multiples of eleven." with the edit summary "(I added the sentence on multiples of eleven in hopes that someone will explain this oddity)". I removed the change because it belongs on the talk page, not in the article.
:One of Gunter's goals was for the result of dividing a mile by the length of his new chain be an integer. The prime factorization of a mile, in feet, is 11·5·3·25. The length of the chain chosen by Gunter is 66, or 11·3·2. The remaining factors of a mile are 5·24, which is 80, so there are 80 chains per mile. --Gerry Ashton (talk) 14:23, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the root factor is the length of the furlong at 220 yards.  This is traditionally how far oxen could plough without pausing.  The chain of 22 yards was a tenth of this.  Why oxen should need to pause at 220 yards, not 200 or 240, escapes me, but this is related to the introduction of a new kind of plough in the Saxon period in England.  Earlier fieldsystems seem to have squarer fields and suggest that the plough them in use could only be dragged about 100 yards before pausing.  Peterkingiron (talk) 22:16, 20 October 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: I doubt the claim that oxen had to pause after 220 yards. There is nothing to stop them from pausing and then continuing in the same line. I suspect, but have no sources to support, that the turn-around area wouldn't be much use for planting, so the 220 yards is probably a compromise between having turn-around areas at convenient intervals versus not wasting too much land that could be planted if it weren't used as a turn-around. --Jc3s5h (talk) 21:26, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: The explanation given is the standard one that is always given.  Fields were usually laid out with a headland (beyond the end of the acre) for turning.  This is either uncultivated or was ploughed last.  The other factor in the choice of area is that it was the area that a team could plough in a day.  The chain (the width of an acre) was 4 perches, but I do not know which measure came first (nor probably does any one else).  Peterkingiron (talk) 21:04, 18 October 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Eleven

message: I added Template:globalize/USA because examples involving American football are really not optimal for expressing meaning to readers outside the United States.   A US-centric example may be better than no example, but an internationally understandable example is better still.  Obviously an acre is primarily a US/UK unit of measurement but I still anticipate that many readers will be coming from other cultures because they encounter this unfamiliar unit in sources originating in the US or UK, or historical sources.    See Wikipedia:WikiProject Countering systemic bias for more. - PhilipR (talk) 18:50, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I have modified the drawing to show an Association football field (blue tint) as well as the American one. I have removed . --Jc3s5h (talk) 01:42, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks, I think the dual examples are much more internationally understandable. - Regards, PhilipR (talk) 04:37, 7 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Systemic bias 

message: the article actually says:
"An acre is approximately 40% of a hectare.
One acre is 90.75 percent of a 53.33-yard-wide American football field."
while the information is correct, the acusation of weasel words is not.
it's not like 'some say' it is a numerical value of 1.
sort it out.
Did I mention? BLEH (talk) 20:15, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure what Did I mention? BLEH would like done, but I have removed the  templates because the statements, to the stated precision, are true for any modern acre. Jc3s5h (talk) 20:37, 13 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  [which?] FAIL 

message: Isaac Asimov in his book Realm of Measure said an acre was how much could be ploughed in one morning, although stating that it was a rough estimate that varied with rockiness of soil and strength of ox.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.148.6.11 (talk) 17:54, 3 April 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Ploughing was only done before noon, (a bit later than modern noon). After this the oxen were put to pasture, they are slow eaters. This was a day's work. The amount that could be ploughed depended on the soil, the number of oxen pulling the plough, and advances in technology. These advances, especial during the medieval period, meant that an acre got a lot bigger. As political control became centralised there was more standardisation, also many measures, including the acre, were adjusted to be simple ratios of each other e.g. In the Late Middle Ages, Composition of Yards and Perches, an acre is defined as 40 perches in length and 4 in breadth.
QuentinUK (talk) 03:18, 16 January 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: ... simplish ... 1 square yard : 1 acre, which is 1 : 4840, isn't all that simple. Jimp 05:10, 15 October 2015 (UTC)

text: The article as it stood had too much saying the same thing in three different ways with a side box saying it a fourth. I have pruned it heavily: is it clearer now? --Red King (talk) 00:16, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  origin of acre 

message: In the "Historical Origin" section, it states:"The acre was roughly the amount of land tillable by a yoke of oxen in one day." Is this in the 1300s, like the "Act on the Composition of Yards and Perches" quote above, but it is still unclear.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.30.64.115 (talk) 18:47, 27 January 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: The article as it stood had too much saying the same thing in three different ways with a side box saying it a fourth. I have pruned it heavily: is it clearer now? --Red King (talk) 00:16, 28 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title: Unclear?

message: Why are values given to .001 yard?  Whoever wrote code instead of just doing the math manually has made my point as to why automating can be bad.
I remember reading this article months or years ago and the equivalent in yards, 220 was just typed in.  So if you want to replace typing with code, this is about the worst example I've ever seen of it and I think it needs changed back. 40ac&amule (talk)  —Preceding undated comment added 18:20, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. Jc3s5h (talk) 19:01, 14 October 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unusual conversions 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

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thread_title:  External links modified (January 2018) 

message: There is a section in chain (unit) called Modern use and historic cultural references which is a great repository for traditional usages. Has anyone got suitable material to start a similar section here? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 12:59, 1 August 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modern use and historic cultural references 

message: Just a note to save anyone else going through the same time-wasting edit as I've just made and abandoned ...
The metric equivalent of an acre is given in this article to about ten significant figures yet the measurement it is based on only has four. Physics 101 teaches that precision cannot increase by multiplication. However, since the yard was defined, not measured, as "exactly" 0.9144 metres, than it is equally exactly 0.914 400 000 000 or as many decimal places as desired. Thus the precision given is valid. --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 11:08, 17 February 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Unwarranted precision? 

message: * da m²
* da m²
* dam²
See Special:Diff/908424105 if this question happens to come up again ~ ToBeFree (talk) 16:52, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It strikes me as needlessly unfriendly to visitors to abbreviate decametre, given that even the unabbreviated name is rarely encountered - it is always spelt out as 10m. (The same is true of decimetre, almost always spelt out as 100mm or 10cm).  --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 19:34, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree. The SVG can be edited like a text file; the discussed text can be found by searching for "da m". However, replacing it by a longer text would likely require more space than is available. As the image seems to be meant to illustrate several unusual units, we can't remove the text either. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 21:21, 29 July 2019 (UTC)

text: "dam" is correct there. Compare decametre and decimetre. One could argue that there should be no space between "da" and "m", but modifying the image to get rid of the space would be rather tricky and probably more effort than it's worth. Huon (talk) 16:40, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  There is a "hair space" (unicode character 8202) between the words. That's perfect, but not rendered correctly by the Wikipedia server. When you open the SVG file directly, you may notice that the actual space is much smaller than the incorrectly displayed space. I guess the problem will solve itself one day, when the thumbnail generator is improved. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 16:46, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: So much the better. I had missed that it's an SVG. Huon (talk) 16:58, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It's incorrect to put any space between an SI prefix and the unit it is prefixed to. The image should be edited to remove the hair space. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:59, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: My original statement was wrong, as I was having a mental block: it is indeed dam2. I could easily remove the space in the image if it were a bitmap. But since it is an improperly rendered SVG, we'll just have to wait for a rendering improvement, as mentioned by  ~ ToBeFree. Anyway, case closed as far as I am concerned. Thanks to all for the input. Rtmirand (talk) 16:09, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It's just a text file. Removing a space is easier than with any bitmap; the largest challenge is finding the text "da m". I'll do so per 's comment. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:12, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  at File:Comparison_land_area_units.svg, revision 360024162. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:24, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Image "da m²" vs "da&#8202;m²" vs "dam²" 

message: (First time using talk; hope it's correct). In the article on "Acre" the short line of text above the image at right erroneously says "1 are = 1 da m2". This should be "1 are = 1 dm2".
Rtmirand (talk) 07:45, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: "dam" is correct there. Compare decametre and decimetre. One could argue that there should be no space between "da" and "m", but modifying the image to get rid of the space would be rather tricky and probably more effort than it's worth. Huon (talk) 16:40, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  There is a "hair space" (unicode character 8202) between the words. That's perfect, but not rendered correctly by the Wikipedia server. When you open the SVG file directly, you may notice that the actual space is much smaller than the incorrectly displayed space. I guess the problem will solve itself one day, when the thumbnail generator is improved. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 16:46, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: So much the better. I had missed that it's an SVG. Huon (talk) 16:58, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It's incorrect to put any space between an SI prefix and the unit it is prefixed to. The image should be edited to remove the hair space. Jc3s5h (talk) 17:59, 29 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: My original statement was wrong, as I was having a mental block: it is indeed dam2. I could easily remove the space in the image if it were a bitmap. But since it is an improperly rendered SVG, we'll just have to wait for a rendering improvement, as mentioned by  ~ ToBeFree. Anyway, case closed as far as I am concerned. Thanks to all for the input. Rtmirand (talk) 16:09, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: It's just a text file. Removing a space is easier than with any bitmap; the largest challenge is finding the text "da m". I'll do so per 's comment. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:12, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
replies: text:  at File:Comparison_land_area_units.svg, revision 360024162. ~ ToBeFree (talk) 18:24, 30 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Moved from [[User talk:Rtmirand]] 

message: Acre has moved to Acre (unit).  This does have advantages: editors regularly add links to Acre which lead to the unit but were intended for another meaning such as Acre, Israel or Acre (state).  ( is one I fixed yesterday.)  However,  still redirects to Acre (unit), so all links will lead to the same place as before, but the unit no longer has the most concise title.  One option is to move Acre (disambiguation) to Acre, perhaps after a requested move discussion.  This could even be done boldly if we are sure there is no primary topic, as long as someone is happy to fix the 5,082 articles which link to the unit and would need to be edited to link to its new title.  Certes (talk) 09:51, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm inclined to revert the move which is undiscussed as far as I can see. If someone wants to propose a move along the lines you describe, they should do so after giving it some thought to see what's involved (how many pages would need to be fixed?). I would have thought acre was the best title for the unit per WP:PRIMARYTOPIC but a discussion would bring out the specialists. In due course I would have to update  if the link for acre is changed. That's not a big deal but I would have reverted the move already if you hadn't posted here. Johnuniq (talk) 10:13, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Agree that it should be reverted until properly discussed and consensus reached. Laterthanyouthink (talk) 11:07, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: I've reverted the retargetting of new redirect Acre to Acre (disambiguation), because that would result in a malplaced disambiguation page.  Having  lead to the disambiguation page is an idea worth discussing, but should only be done via a page move and in conjunction with fixing the 5,000 incoming links.  I didn't (and can't) revert the page move, but I would consider it perfectly reasonable for someone else to do so.  Certes (talk) 12:49, 24 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for the fixes. I restored this page (the unit) to Acre. I started fixing the incoming links but interfered with the bot so I'll leave that for a few hours and check again. Johnuniq (talk) 00:04, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
replies: text: See also User talk:Goddess Helvetica#Please stop (13:15, 24 August 2021 (UTC)

text: Much as I dislike the way PTOPICs collect bad links, I don't think there's any argument that the unit is anything but PTOPIC. Narky Blert (talk) 08:29, 25 August 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Page move 

message: The redirect Ekar has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached.   -- Tamzin[cetacean needed] (she|they|xe) 22:42, 14 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "[[:Ekar]]" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]] 

message: I’ve tweaked the Historical origins section a bit:</br>
The section on the Norman acre needs clarifying: how did it differ from land measurement in the rest of France? Was it a measure of ploughland, like the acre, or was it a square measure, like the arpent carre? Also, giving a value in square meters is unhelpful; what was it in traditional units?</br>
I’ve also added a brief description of the morgen, and removed the table, as it is off-topic (It’s superfluous in a page on a different unit of measurement altogether, and is the same as the one on the morgen page if anyone wants to see it). I also notice there’s a discussion above about the "one man one ox" definition being suspect; I’ve added a qualifier form the other page, but there wasn’t a ref to back it up (I've requested one there). I trust everyone is OK with that. Moonraker12 (talk) 10:42, 28 June 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Historical origin 

message: These two phrases are contradictory
 As detailed in the box on the right, an acre was roughly the amount of land tillable by a yoke of oxen in one day.
 An acre was the amount of land tillable by one man behind one ox in one day. (in the box)
Considering that the carucate specifies "8-oxen team", I suggest to specify everywhere for the acre "2-oxen team" rather than "oxen team".  
I feel interesting to know how many furrows were contained in the width (this is equivalent to their distance and to the fraction of the working day needed for a furlong, i.e. the time before the oxen's rest).
thanks for your attention.
151.29.137.229 (talk) 05:47, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: Indeed. Actually the sentence in the lead paragraph says "yoke of 8 oxen", but the cited reference says "ox". (Sadly, much of the WP worlds seems to regard this as insignificant, just as long as the bits have been copied from somewhere.) Anyway, I will change this - perhaps this brings us down to an inconsistency factor of 2, at least. Imaginatorium (talk) 08:27, 25 September 2023 (UTC)

text: The "Description" paragraph claims an acre was originally what we would now call 2 acres, being 2 chains wide, not one, but needing a "yoke" of oxen, perhaps 2 oxen, perhaps thus twice the oxpower. Hmmm... Imaginatorium (talk) 08:38, 25 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  comment