Dunam

A dunam (Ottoman Turkish, Arabic: دونم; Turkish: dönüm; Hebrew: דונם; Yiddish: דונאם), also known as a donum or dunum and as the old, Turkish, or Ottoman stremma,[1] was the Ottoman unit of area analogous in role (but not equal) to the Greek stremma or English acre, representing the amount of land that could be ploughed by a team of oxen in a day. The legal definition was[when?] "forty standard paces in length and breadth",[2] but its actual area varied considerably from place to place, from a little more than 900 square metres [9,690 sq ft] in Ottoman Palestine to around 2,500 square metres [26,910 square feet] in Iraq.[3][4]

The unit is still in use in many areas previously ruled by the Ottomans, although the new or metric dunam has been redefined as exactly one decare (1,000 square metres [10,760 square feet]), which is 1/10 hectare (1/10 × 10,000 square metres [107,640 square feet]), like the modern Greek royal stremma.[4]

  1. ^ "Dunam". www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org. Retrieved 31 March 2025.
  2. ^ V.L. Ménage, Review of Speros Vryonis, Jr. The decline of medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the process of islamization from the eleventh through the fifteenth century, Berkeley, 1971; in Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) 36:3 (1973), pp. 659–661. at JSTOR (subscription required)
  3. ^ Cowan, J. Milton; Arabic-English Dictionary, The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic (4th Edition, Spoken Languages Services, Inc.; 1994; p. 351)
  4. ^ a b Λεξικό της κοινής Νεοελληνικής (Dictionary of Modern Greek), Ινστιτούτο Νεοελληνικών Σπουδών, Θεσσαλονίκη, 1998. ISBN 960-231-085-5

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