Hides to Square Kilometers (hide to km²)

1 hide equals 0.4856227707 square kilometers (rounded).

1 hide = 0.4856227707 square kilometers

How to convert hides to square kilometers

To convert hides to square kilometers, multiply the number of hides by 0.4856227707. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply square kilometers by 2.059211512 (rounded).

square kilometers = hides × 0.4856227707

Example: 10 hides = 4.856227707 square kilometers.

Approximate value. Standards for the hide varied by place and period, so this converter uses the most commonly cited value. Treat results as estimates, not exact figures.

About these units

Hide (hide)

Medieval EnglishHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)Approximate value

About 120 acres, the land needed to support one household. The Domesday Book assessed England in hides, but the real size varied by region.

Old English hid, tied to a word for family, named land that could support one peasant household. Bede, writing around 731, described territory by the number of families it fed, and the hide grew into the main tax unit of Anglo-Saxon England, assessed in the Domesday survey of 1086 against figures for 1066.

Treating it as an area is risky. Wikipedia calls it a measure of value rather than of size and says the old idea of a fixed 120 acres cannot be sustained, though Cambridgeshire entries do reckon a hide as 120 geld acres, which were units of assessment and not ground area. Four virgates made a hide in most counties, but Sussex used eight, and Kent counted in sulungs.

The figure used here, about 120 acres or roughly 485,600 square meters, is the traditional round number. Northern and eastern counties under Danish law used the carucate instead, nominally the same size, divided into eight oxgangs.

1 hide = 485,622.7707 square meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Hide (unit); Wikipedia: Carucate; Domesday Book Online: Glossary

Square Kilometer (km²)

Metric (SI)Current unit

One million square meters (100 hectares). Used for the area of cities, countries and lakes.

Metric land measure took a surprisingly long time to settle on the kilometer. The meter was defined in 1799, yet people initially preferred the myriameter, 10,000 meters, and the French phrase myriamètres par heure was still in print in 1802. The Netherlands adopted the kilometer in 1817 under the name mijl. Once the kilometer was established, the square kilometer followed naturally as the unit for areas too large to count comfortably in hectares or square meters.

One square kilometer is 1,000,000 square meters, or 100 hectares, about 0.3861 square miles or 247.1 acres. A useful picture comes from history: many medieval European cities were enclosed by walls around roughly a square kilometer, with Delft at about 0.9 km² and Lucca at about 1.09 km². A standard 18-hole golf course of 6,000 meters needs about 0.8 km². The symbol km² means the square of a kilometer, not a thousand square meters. The planned Square Kilometre Array radio telescope takes its name from the collecting area it aims for.

1 square kilometer = 1,000,000 square meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Square kilometre; Wikipedia: Kilometres per hour

Related conversions

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