Hectares

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A metric unit for measuring land area that represents 10,000 square meters, primarily utilized in agricultural and forestry practices
2. This area measurement, equal to 10,000 square meters, is often employed to assess land in farming and ecological studies
3. A unit used to quantify large plots of land, defined as 10,000 square meters commonly applied in land management

Etymology: The hectare is a recent coinage, and its name is a deliberate piece of metric construction. It was introduced in France during the revolutionary reforms of the metric system, where the "hecto-" prefix comes from Greek "hekaton," meaning one hundred, and "are" was the base unit of land area, equal to 100 square metres. Combining hecto- with are gives one hectare: 100 ares, or 10,000 square metres. The metric system's land unit was designed to fit the decimal logic that governed the rest of the system, so the hectare was built to be easy to calculate rather than to match any traditional measure. Older land units such as the acre or the arpent varied from place to place, which is precisely what the reformers wanted to avoid.

Synonyms: acres, land, plots, fields, estates