Acre

How to spell acre

4 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce acre

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does acre mean?

1. nounA unit of land area equal to 4,840 square yards, used to measure ground such as farms or estates.

Acre in a sentence

• The farm covered nearly every acre of the valley floor.

• They bought a single acre of woodland for the cabin.

Where does acre come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Acre comes from the Old English word æcer, which meant simply 'a field' or a piece of cultivated land, and goes back to a Proto-Germanic root shared with the Dutch akker and German Acker. That root is part of a very old word family: it is a cousin of the Latin ager and the Greek agros, both meaning 'field', which is why we also see it inside words like 'agriculture'. Originally an acre was not a fixed mathematical area at all but the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plough in a single day, so its size varied with the soil and the team. It was only standardised much later into the modern measure of 4,840 square yards. The spelling drifted from the Old English -er to the -re ending under the influence of French scribal habits in the medieval period, which is exactly why the modern word ends in the slightly counterintuitive -re even though it is pronounced 'ay-ker'.

How the word is built

• acre (single root from Old English æcer: field, tilled land); the -re spelling is a later French-influenced respelling