Exactly how large is an acre of land?

[Lavender]

I was wondering how big an acre of land is?
I have a large collection of fields that play an important role in the last part of my novel and I am interested to know this so I can describe the fields as being so many acres.

Also, how far is a league? e.g. "seven leagues away from the town..."

Thanks guys.

[Lawfire]

One (1) acre equals 4,840 square yards or 43,560 square feet. It is slightly bigger than a square with 208 feet per side. Forty (40) acres (a common size piece of land in Michigan anyway) makes up a square that is 1/4 mile per side. Six hundred-forty (640) acres make up a square mile. As far as metric units...one would have to do the math.

Originally, a league was the distance a person could walk in an hour. As far as I know, it had many values and that is why it is no longer used.

[Ravana]

A league is generally considered to be roughly three miles—this is what most modern writers will mean when using it—but, as mentioned, it has seen so many variants that you need to know the context it is being used in. For that matter, you also need to know how long the mile in question is.

An acre is as given—for most uses: again, there are variants. For an interesting take on why it is that amount—as well as on some other older-style measurements:

1 acre equals:

4,840 square yards
1⁄640 square mile
10 square chains (1 chain = 66 feet = 22 yards = 4 rods = 100 links)
160 [square] perches. A [linear] perch is the same as a rod (16.5 feet)
1 chain by a furlong (a furlong is 10 chains)
4 roods (a rood being a rod by a furlong)

Note that every single one of the above measures is also subject to variations of place and time: those are just the equivalences the English standardized them at, so are the ones most likely to be encountered. There are a great many other possibilities… though land was rarely measured in fathoms, ells, spans or hands, and never—to the best of my knowledge—in nautical miles, nor, even by the geekiest of geeks, in picas. (A pica being 1/6 inch, this makes an acre 225,815,040 square picas. Which I probably shouldn't have calculated, given my previous sentence. My defense is that I didn't actually try measuring any land that way. ) At least if you know an acre was 10 square somethings, it makes more sense than the rather arbitrary relation to feet, yards, or miles.

By comparison, Imperial Roman measurements might not even be close to these: we know, for instance, that a Roman mile was 5,000 Roman feet, but we don't know exactly how long a foot was, though all modern estimates put it at marginally less than the foot we use today. (The value is usually around 0.97 modern feet.) Since the modern mile is 5,280 feet, this makes the Roman mile significantly shorter. The Roman league was—did you guess 15,000 feet? That would make sense, given modern values, but in fact you'd be way off: it was actually 7,500 feet, or 1.5 miles.

[Benjamin Clayborne]

The way I memorized the area of an acre (43,560 ft²) is that it's 99% of 44,000. (44000 * 0.99 = 43560)

[ThinkerX]

My parents homestead here in the frequently frozen north was 160 acres - a standard size for the time. They lost one part of it right off because it was underwater, and the state took another part for a highway right-of-way, effectively splitting it in two.

[Eeirail]

4046.8564224 square meters [640 square miles] to be exact for the acres

There are lots of different answers on how long a league is. It depends on what type of measurement you are trying to compare a league to. For instance, if you want to know how many miles a league equals, the answer would be 3 miles. If you would like to know how many kilometers a league equals, it is 4.83 kilometers. In nautical terms, one league is equal to 2.61 sea miles.
Hope that explains it enough.

[Butterfly]

4046.8564224 square meters [640 square miles] to be exact for the acres

Are you sure? I thought it's more like 640 sq feet.

[grahamguitarman]

Are you sure? I thought it's more like 640 sq feet.

LOL I agree, 640 square miles is more like a county than an acre

[Butterfly]

Typically, it seems that a football (soccer) pitch is about 1 and 1/2 acres.

[Devor]

For a better impression, a home and a yard in American suburbia runs about a quarter acre, and I believe the measurement has something to do with how much a team of oxen could plow in a day.

I think it's important to note that there's no shape involved with acres. It doesn't matter how long and skinny the property is, or how many corners, it's the surface area that we count in acres.