a·cre

(ā′kər)

1. A unit of area in the US Customary System, used in land and sea floor measurement and equal to 160 square rods, 4,840 square yards, or 43,560 square feet. See Table at measurement.

a. acres Property in the form of land; estate.

b. Archaic A field or plot of arable land.

3. often acres A wide expanse, as of land or other matter: "acres of textureless carpeting" (Anne Tyler).

[Middle English aker, field, acre, from Old English æcer; see agro- in Indo-European roots.]

A·cre

(ä′krə, ä′kər) also Ak·ko (ä-kō′, ä′kō)

A port city of northern Israel on the Bay of Haifa. During the Crusades it changed hands many times between Christians and Muslims. Acre was assigned to the Arabs in the United Nations partition of Palestine in 1948 but was captured by Israel shortly thereafter.

American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

acres

(ˈeɪkəz)

pl n

1. land, esp a large area

2. informal a large amount

Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers 1991, 1994, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2014

ThesaurusAntonymsRelated WordsSynonymsLegend:

Noun

acres - extensive landed property (especially in the country) retained by the owner for his own use; "the family owned a large estate on Long Island"

demesne, landed estate, estate, land

freehold - an estate held in fee simple or for life

immovable, real estate, real property, realty - property consisting of houses and land

glebe - plot of land belonging to an English parish church or an ecclesiastical office

leasehold - land or property held under a lease

smallholding - a piece of land under 50 acres that is sold or let to someone for cultivation

homestead - land acquired from the United States public lands by filing a record and living on and cultivating it under the homestead law

feoff, fief - a piece of land held under the feudal system

barony - the estate of a baron

countryseat - an estate in the country

Crown land - land that belongs to the Crown

manor - the landed estate of a lord (including the house on it)

seigneury, seigniory, signory - the estate of a seigneur

hacienda - a large estate in Spanish-speaking countries

plantation - an estate where cash crops are grown on a large scale (especially in tropical areas)

entail - land received by fee tail

Mentioned in

References in classic literature

"You're like Uncle Will, who owned thousands of acres and wanted to own a million, and who wound up as night watchman.

"I don't know which is the dinkier," she observed finally, "--owning a few little acres and the team you're driving, or not owning any acres and driving a team somebody else owns for wages."

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That they were only sowing the clover on fifteen acres, not on all the forty-five, was still more annoying to him.

And then eight hundred acres of wheat, three hundred of potatoes, and four hundred of clover, and not one acre exhausted.

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He says there are at least four hundred acres, and every foot of it good for planting.

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He now found himself in a nook of several acres, where the oak and manzanita and madrono gave way to clusters of stately redwoods.

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Also, Gooper and Greenlaw in their time cleared the virgin forest from three fields of forty acres. To-day I have those three fields sown with Canada peas, and in the spring they shall be ploughed under for green manure.

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Now arrived the abbot and several hundred monks and nuns, and behind them a multitude of pilgrims and a couple of acres of foundlings, all drawn by the prodigious smoke, and all in a grand state of excitement.

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"And you would be pleased to have, instead of this terrace of twenty feet, an enclosure of two acres?"

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Instead of the great enclosures of a hundred acres in which she was now accustomed to toil there were little fields below her of less than half-a-dozen acres, so numerous that they looked from this height like the meshes of a net.

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I planted about two acres and a half of upland; and as it was only about fifteen years since the land was cleared, and I myself had got out two or three cords of stumps, I did not give it any manure; but in the course of the summer it appeared by the arrowheads which I turned up in hoeing, that an extinct nation had anciently dwelt here and planted corn and beans ere white men came to clear the land, and so, to some extent, had exhausted the soil for this very crop.

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ROAMING BY the mountainside at sundown, a Wolf saw his own shadow become greatly extended and magnified, and he said to himself, "Why should I, being of such an immense size and extending nearly an acre in length, be afraid of the Lion?

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