Hides to Square Meters (hide to m²)
1 hide equals 485,622.7707 square meters (rounded).
How to convert hides to square meters
To convert hides to square meters, multiply the number of hides by 485,622.7707. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply square meters by 0.000002059211512 (rounded).
square meters = hides × 485,622.7707
Example: 10 hides = 4,856,227.707 square meters.
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)
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 Meter (m²)
The SI unit of area: a square one meter on each side. Used for floor areas and property sizes in most of the world.
Squaring the meter was built into the metric system from the start. The French law of 18 Germinal, Year III (7 April 1795) defined the are, the land unit that gave the hectare its name, as exactly 100 square meters, so the square meter was already the foundation of metric land measure. Nobody is credited with inventing it as a separate unit. It is simply the area of a square one meter on each side, and any SI prefix that works for the meter works for it, with the prefix squared along with the unit.
That squaring catches people out: a square kilometer is one million square meters, not one thousand. Since 1983 the meter has been defined through the speed of light, so the square meter is tied to a constant of nature as well as to the second. A hectare, about the area of Trafalgar Square in London, is 10,000 square meters. In everyday terms one square meter is about 10.76 square feet. Unicode has a compatibility character for it, but the recommended way to write it is the plain superscript two: m².
The square meter is the reference unit for area on this site.
Sources: Wikipedia: Square metre; Wikipedia: Are (unit); NIST: the meter and the SI redefinition
Related conversions
- Square meters to hides (reverse)
- Hides to square kilometers
- Hides to hectares
- Hides to square inches
- Hides to square feet
- Hides to square yards
- Hides to acres
- Hides to square miles
- Square kilometers to square meters
- Hectares to square meters
- Square inches to square meters
- Square feet to square meters
- Square yards to square meters
- Acres to square meters
- Square miles to square meters
- Square centimeters to square meters
- Square millimeters to square meters
- Tsubo to square meters
- Pyeong to square meters
- Rai (Thai) to square meters
See all area units.