acre

Meanings

1. 1
   noun

   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.

   Buried within the Mediterranean littoral are some seventy to ninety million tons of slag from ancient smelting, about a third of it concentrated in Iberia. This ceaseless industrial fueling caused the deforestation of an estimated fifty to seventy million acres of woodlands.

2. 2
   noun

   A wide expanse.

   I like my new house—there’s acres of space!

3. 3
   noun

   a unit of area (4840 square yards) used in English-speaking countries

4. 4
   noun

   Any of various similar units of area in other systems.

5. 5
   noun

   A large quantity.

6. 6
   noun

   A field.

7. 7
   noun

   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. 8
   noun

   A duel fought between individual Scots and Englishmen in the borderlands.

Etymology

Etymology tree Proto-Indo-European *h₂eǵ-? Proto-Indo-European *h₂éǵros Proto-Germanic *akraz Proto-West Germanic *akr Old English æcer Middle English aker English acre 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 Acker (“field, acre”), Norwegia…