Hectare

How to spell hectare

7 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hectare

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hectare mean?

1. nounA metric unit of area equal to ten thousand square metres, used mainly for measuring land.

Hectare in a sentence

• The farm covers nearly forty hectare of arable land.

• The council rezoned a single hectare near the river for housing.

Where does hectare come from?

Language of origin: French

This word is a deliberate coinage of the French Revolution, when scholars built the metric system in the 1790s and needed a tidy name for a unit of land area. They took 'are', the base unit of area equal to one hundred square metres, whose name comes from the Latin area meaning an open piece of level ground. To this they prefixed 'hect-', a contraction of the Greek hekaton meaning 'hundred', because a hectare is exactly one hundred ares, or ten thousand square metres. English adopted the word in the early nineteenth century, keeping the French spelling intact, which is why it ends in the slightly unexpected '-are' rather than the more English-looking '-air'. The same Greek 'hect-' for a hundred reappears in 'hectmetre' and historically in 'hectogram', a useful clue that the unit is built around the number one hundred.

How the word is built

• hect- (from Greek hekaton: hundred)
• are (a metric unit of area, from Latin area: open space)