Oxgangs to Square Meters (oxgang to m²)
1 oxgang equals 60,702.84634 square meters (rounded).
How to convert oxgangs to square meters
To convert oxgangs to square meters, multiply the number of oxgangs by 60,702.84634. The factor is rounded to 10 significant digits. To go the other way, multiply square meters by 0.0000164736921 (rounded).
square meters = oxgangs × 60,702.84634
Example: 10 oxgangs = 607,028.4634 square meters.
Approximate value. Standards for the oxgang varied by place and period, so this converter uses the most commonly cited value. Treat results as estimates, not exact figures.
About these units
Oxgang (oxgang)
About 15 acres, an eighth of a hide: the area an ox could plow in a season. Actual sizes varied by region.
Oxgang means the land an ox could go over, from Old English oxangang. Its Latin twin, bovata or bovate, comes from the word for ox, and a peasant holding one was called an oxganger or bovater. The unit belonged mainly to the Danelaw, the part of England settled by Vikings, where Domesday Book records it in Latin as bovata.
Eight oxgangs made a carucate, the ploughland of a full eight-ox team, so two oxgangs equalled a virgate. Wikipedia gives an English average of about 15 acres, and says elsewhere that it could be as little as 15 and averaged roughly 20, depending on soil and local custom. The figure used here is 15 acres, close to 60,700 square meters.
Scotland kept a parallel system in which eight oxgangs formed a ploughgate. The word survives in place names such as Oxgangs, a suburb of Edinburgh, and Oxgang in Kirkintilloch.
1 oxgang = 60,702.84634 square meters (approximately).
Sources: Wikipedia: Oxgang; 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 oxgangs (reverse)
- Oxgangs to square kilometers
- Oxgangs to hectares
- Oxgangs to square inches
- Oxgangs to square feet
- Oxgangs to square yards
- Oxgangs to acres
- Oxgangs 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.