acre
/ˈeɪ.kɚ/
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: 3.93 in modern English
6
Scrabble Score
4
Letters
2
Syllables
4
Unique Chars
Meaning
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.
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.
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).
Obsolete
Example Sentences
- "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."
- "I like my new house—there’s acres of space!"
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”), Norwegian åker (“field”) and Swedish åker (“field”), Icelandic akur (“field”), Latin ager (“land, field, acre, countryside”), Ancient Greek ἀγρός (agrós, “field”), Sanskrit अज्र (ájra, “field, plain”).
Origin
Word Breakdown
Regional Pronunciation
- American English: /ˈeɪ.kɚ/
- British English: /ˈeɪ.kə/