Dictionaries › English

acre

Pronunciation: /ˈeɪ.kə/

The English word “acre” has 8 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. An English unit of land area (symbol: a. or ac.) originally denoting a day's ploughing for a yoke of oxen, now standardized as 4,840 square yards or 4,046.86 square metres.
  2. An area of 10,240 square yards or 4 quarters.
  3. Any of various similar units of area in other systems.
  4. A wide expanse.
  5. A large quantity.
  6. A field.
  7. The acre's breadth by the length, English units of length equal to the statute dimensions of the acre: 22 yd (≈20 m) by 220 yd (≈200 m).
  8. A duel fought between individual Scots and Englishmen in the borderlands.

Etymology

From Middle English acre, aker, from Old English æcer (“field where crops are grown”), from Proto-West Germanic *akr, from Proto-Germanic *akraz (“field”), from Proto-Indo-European *h₂éǵros (“field”). Doublet of agriculture. Cognate with Scots acre, aker, acker (“acre, field, arable land”), North Frisian ecir (“field, a measure of land”), West Frisian eker (“field”), Dutch akker (“field”), German…

Keep exploring: in the interactive dictionary every word of a definition is a link. Open “acre” there

More English words

About this dictionary

The English dictionary on Glottosphere has 650,529 entries with a page. Browse the English dictionary.

Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.