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A dunam (Ottoman Turkish, Arabic: ; ; ; ), also known as a donum or dunum and as the old, Turkish, or Ottoman stremma, 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 "forty standard paces in length and breadth", but its actual area varied considerably from place to place, from a little more than 900 m2 in Ottoman Palestine to around 2 500 m2 in Iraq.

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unit of area
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measured physical quantity
area
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Encyclopedic overview

14 sections
Contents
  • History
  • Definition
  • Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro
  • Bulgaria
  • Cyprus
  • Greece
  • Iraq
  • Israel, Palestine and Turkey
  • United Arab Emirates
  • Variations
  • Similar units
  • See also
  • References
  • External links

A dunam (Ottoman Turkish, Arabic: ; ; ; ), also known as a donum or dunum and as the old, Turkish, or Ottoman stremma, 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 "forty standard paces in length and breadth", but its actual area varied considerably from place to place, from a little more than 900 m2 in Ottoman Palestine to around 2 500 m2 in Iraq.

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 1 000 m2.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “dunam” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.