Morgens

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Units of land measurement traditionally used in parts of Germany and the Netherlands; amounts of land area considered suitable to be plowed by one person with a team of oxen in a morning; historical agricultural land divisions varying regionally
2. Historical measurements referring to specific areas of farmland equating roughly to the amount tilled by a farmer in the morning hours; traditional land units used primarily in central Europe; varied in exact size depending on locality
3. A customary old land area measure corresponding to the extent of arable land that could be worked within a morning by a single laborer with draft animals; used mainly in Germanic regions; size differs by region and context

Etymology: "Morgens" is the plural of "morgen", a German and Dutch unit of land. The singular is itself the everyday word for "morning" in both languages, and the link is literal: a morgen was the area a team of oxen could plough in a single morning. A field's size was measured by how long a working day it demanded, so a farmer's acreage was a unit of time turned into ground. Because the unit varied from region to region, the same name could describe quite different plots, and the plural simply counts several of them. The English words "morn" and "morrow" come from the same root, so the old sense of "morning" survives in English too, though only in those two words.