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An area of land one chain (four rods) wide by one furlong in length. As the traditional furlong could vary in length from country to country, so did the acre. In England an acre was 4,840 square yards (4,050 m 2 ), in Scotland 6,150 square yards (5,140 m 2 ) and in Ireland 7,840 square yards (6,560 m 2 ).
An acre is an area that is one furlong long and one chain (66 feet or 22 yards) wide. For this reason, the furlong was once also called an acre's length, [2] though in modern usage an area of one acre can be of any shape. The term furlong, or shot, was also used to describe a grouping of adjacent strips within an open field. [3]
The chain (abbreviated ch) is a unit of length equal to 66 feet (22 yards), used in both the US customary and Imperial unit systems. It is subdivided into 100 links. [1] [2] There are 10 chains in a furlong, and 80 chains in one statute mile. [2] In metric terms, it is 20.1168 m long. [2]
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The rod is useful as a unit of length because integer multiples of it can form one acre of square measure (area). The 'perfect acre' [2] is a rectangular area of 43,560 square feet, bounded by sides 660 feet (a furlong) long and 66 feet (a chain) wide (220 yards by 22 yards) or, equivalently, 40 rods by 4 rods. An acre is therefore 160 square ...
Gunter's chain was 66 feet, or one chain (20.1 metres), in length (i.e. one tenth of a furlong) and consisted of 100 links, making each link 1 ⁄ 1000 furlong (201 millimetres). The decimal nature of these units and of the device made it easy to calculate the area of a rectangle of land in acres and decimal fractions of an acre.
The basic unit of length in the imperial and U.S. customary systems is the yard, defined as exactly 0.9144 m by international treaty in 1959. [2] [5] Common imperial units and U.S. customary units of length include: [6] thou or mil (1 ⁄ 1000 of an inch) inch (25.4 mm) foot (12 inches, 0.3048 m) yard (3 feet, 0.9144 m)
The main units of length (inch, foot, yard and international mile) were the same in the US, though the US rarely uses some of the intermediate units today, such as the (surveyor's) chain (22 yards) and the furlong (220 yards). At one time, the definition of the nautical mile was based on the surface area of the Clarke ellipsoid.