It’s an imperial unit based on foot, so there’s why. (4840 square feet, wtf)
Close, it’s 4840 square yards not square feet,.
I get what you mean, but something about the word close bothers me when they were missing 88.8% of the area.
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One hundred square feet is ten feet by ten feet on a side. Now, change each side to ten yards by ten yards. That means each side is thirty feet long. Thirty feet times thirty feet is nine hundred square feet.
3x3. They counted 1x1. 1/9. 8/9 is .8888
Easy math on divde by 9 1/9. .1111111 2/9 .222222 3/9 .333333 All the way to 9/9 where .9999 equals 1
The area is squared, so 12-(1/3)2 which is .888 or about 88.8%
dict.cc lied to me!
I’m pretty sure an acre was originally defined as the area of land that a medieval peasant could plow in one day.
There. I’m glad that’s all cleared up.
For those of us that regularly plow large tracts of land using manual tools, this is an extremely useful unit. Anyways, if that isn’t a usual activity for you, an acre is an area of 10 square chains, or roughly an area 1 mile long and 8 feet wide.
1 mile long and 8 feet wide.
That might be accurate but that’s like the worst way to imagine the area.
You could have just said about 220 feet in each direction.
8 miles long, 1 foot wide… I’m pretty sure that’s worse.
just plow a field and find out, it’s simple really.
I’ve been milkin’ and plowin’ so long
Even Ezekiel thinks that my mind is gone
Fool!
Nah you’d either overestimate because you’re not starving and disfigured from the knights from the neighbouring manor maiming you for fun, or you’d underestimate because no one is whipping you and threatening to kill your children if you don’t meet your quota.
Having spent a good part of my life in the countryside, that’s actually helpful
Grab a couple of oxen and a plough, and plough all day long. The amount you’ve done is about an acre
The more you know! doo doo doo… doo!🌈⭐
Ugh. Where did 660 feet come from? Where did 66 feet come from? A line of potatoes (linear) to measure an acre (area)? A strip of land 43,560 x 1 ft is an acre requiring 87k+ potatoes.
Also, 18 homes wont fit on an acre.
This graphic is fucking awful.
An acre is not just a unit of area measurement but has a traditional shape or aspect ratio per acre, based on the land plots it was used for.
1 acre is traditionally 60 ft x 660 ft, also known as 1 chain by 1 furlong.
It’s similar to if you said you could lay X potatoes across a football field. Yes a football field is an area but it also has a defined length.
I’m no expert but i believe that’s not how the term is used today. Like if a house is advertised as coming on a quarter acre of land, that says absolutely nothing about the dimensions of that land
True, I was just explaining where those numbers came from.
660 feet is a furlong, which comes from one furrow length. It’s the distance two oxen can pull a plow (creating a furrow), without stopping to rest. Then the oxen and person standing atop the plow could have a little rest before turning around to plow the next furrow. Not sure how many furrows but if you repeat this process all day, you’ll have plowed an acre. Potatoes did not exist to farmers when this land measurement was in use. But 66 x 660 is the original definition of an acre, and the only reasonable explanation for why we have 43,560
In California we measure water in Acre Feet. I guess if you know how many acres you have, and how many inches of water your crops need, I guess you’ll know how many acre feet you need.
These numbers all come from people who preferred 12 and 60 as their working base numbers, not 10. A lot of it becomes really elegant once you understand that.
Did they use duodecimal or sexagesimal numeral systems?
66 feet does not match that, also its 1 chain * 10 chains.
and 10 chains = 1 furlong = 1/8 mile
JFC not a single magnitude in metric…
JFC not a single magnitude in metric…
Jentucky Fried Chicken?
What? You don’t naturally measure things in potatoes per football field?
The acre was defined officially as being 1 furlong (40 poles = 660 feet) in length, and 4 poles (66 feet) in breadth.
From the source of the problem.
Whip out your furlongs and poles. Bring some rods and chains, just in case.
Yea but if it’s cold my pole is shorter
What the fuck’s a furlong???
edit: Google says it’s 1/8 of a mile… 201.17m for my SI people.
One of the base units of the superior velocity measurement, furlongs per fortnight.
1/8th of a mile per 14 days…
I don’t know if I should kiss you or kill you for this knowledge.
You never heard the term “back 40”? 160 acres is a quarter section. A section is a mile by a mile, 640 acres. 1/640 of a square mile. Roughly 8 feet wide and a mile long.
8’ x 1 mile works, but the way it would usually be subdivided is to be a 16th section - or 1/4 of 1/4. Like a 16-light window. 2 x 2 furlongs, or a quarter-mile by quarter-mile.
No shit. Read what I wrote again.
Guys, I actually came here to learn something!
CADmonkey, DemBoSain, and HjFun are correct in this case. 43,560 sq. ft., or 4046.86 sq. meters.
Coffeebiscuit presumably dropped a zero accidentally.
0 here it is!
If American, use sports related analogies. About 2/3 of a football field.
Actually it’s pretty much exactly the main play area of a football field, minus 5 yards on either side, or 10 yards on one side(acre in red, association football field in blue): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3AAcre_superimposed_over_football_fields.svg
The unit apparently represents the approximate area of land that one person with a team of oxen could plow in a single day.
Funny enough “about 2/3 the size of a football field” works about as well for places that use that word for soccer too
A FIFA standard field is 1.764 acres (off by 17.6%) and an NFL standard field is 1.322 (off by 11.9%)
Wait, you’re telling me a football field is approximately one football field in size?
Association football fields actually have some flexibility in dimensions (less so for international play), so the 110x50 meter dimension of an NFL field would actually work for soccer
Another fun fact: the rules allow the goal lines to be a maximum of 90m, and the touch lines to be a minimum of 90m, so theoretically a square field could be legal
Edit: source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football_pitch
It’s 1/640th of a square mile
I live in a neighborhood that is all half acre lots. So an acre is two properties on my street. Easy!
I have a 3/4 acre lot. So it’s like my yard and the part of my neighbor’s yard I can see. Easy
Is 200 ft by 200 ft equal to one acre? A piece of land that measures 200 ft by 200 ft is the equivalent of 40,000 square feet. One acre contains 43,560 square feet, making the 200 x 200 ft land equal to approximately 0.918 acres.
Gee, if only someone would come up with a system that properly ordered scales of measurement in a logical and sensible way…
Yeah it looks stupid when you do it like that, almost the same thing as if I told you there was 3,280 feet in a kilometer. Feet are not the base unit here, the mile is.
Asked Google again. Is this it?
How many acres are in a mile by a mile? 1 Square Mile = 640 Acres. There are 640 acres in a square mile, because an acre is defined as an area of 66 feet to 660 feet and equals to 66 * 660 = 43560 square feet and one mile is 5280 feet and one sq.
Because it isn’t really helping it either.
Ignore everything about feet. That’s the different base unit. Idk how else to describe this, they’re using “defined” when they mean “described”? The mile is the base unit. Feet are the base unit of a different system.
The acre was used to subdivide up square miles. It makes more sense if you know 43,650 = 660 * 66. Also, 660 feet is exactly 1/8 of a mile. So once a square mile had been surveyed, you could split each side in half to get 4 squares of 160 acres. You could then split each of those again to get 40 acres (hence the “40 acres and a mule”), and then you could split them again to get 10-acre squares. Then you could split them into 5-acre rectangles, etc. The rectangles are good at keeping access to an existing road, although the skinniness isn’t great. And all of these sub-divisions could live on the same grid.
