Acre
name, noun, slang ·Common ·High school level
Definitions
- 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.
"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 a unit of area (4840 square yards) used in English-speaking countries wordnet
- 3 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.; An area of 10,240 square yards or 4 quarters. historical
- 4 Any of various similar units of area in other systems.
- 5 A wide expanse. informal, plural-normally
"I like my new house—there’s acres of space!"
Show 4 more definitions
- 6 A large quantity. informal, plural-normally
- 7 A field. obsolete
- 8 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
- 9 A duel fought between individual Scots and Englishmen in the borderlands. obsolete
- 1 A port city in northern Israel, holiest city in the Baháʼí Faith.
- 2 A river in South America.
- 3 A surname.
- 4 A state of the North Region, Brazil. Capital: Rio Branco.
Example
More examples"The house isn't huge and it's on about two-thirds of an acre, and when we first bought it I spent several hours every week getting the lawnmower fixed and cutting the lawn, in that order."
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 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”).
Borrowed from French and Latin Acre, from Ancient Greek Ἄκο (Áko) or Ἄκη (Ákē), from Hebrew עכו (ʿAkko), of unknown origin.
From Portuguese Acre, of uncertain origin.
Probably a variant of Acker or Acree/Ackary, though also possibly Americanization of Norwegian Aakre or Low German Egger.
Related phrases
More for "acre"
Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.