Acreage

How to spell acreage

7 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce acreage

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does acreage mean?

1. nounAn area of land measured in acres, or the extent of land itself.

Acreage in a sentence

• The farm came with enough acreage to grow several crops at once.

• Developers measured the acreage before submitting the planning application.

Where does acreage come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The heart of this word is 'acre', which comes from the Old English 'aecer', meaning an open field or a piece of tilled land rather than any fixed measurement. That Germanic root is closely related to the Latin 'ager' and the Greek 'agros', both also meaning 'field', the same element you can spot inside words like 'agriculture'. Only later did 'acre' settle into a precise unit of land, originally the area a yoke of oxen could plough in a single day. The ending '-age', borrowed into English from French and ultimately from Latin, was added to express 'an amount or extent of', giving the modern sense of land measured in acres. The spelling trap is that the silent 'e' of 'acre' is kept when '-age' is attached, so the word is 'acreage' and not 'acrage'.

How the word is built

• acre (a measure of land)
• -age (noun suffix denoting an amount or extent)