Roods to Square Feet (rood to ft²)

1 rood equals 10,890 square feet exactly.

1 rood = 10,890 square feet

How to convert roods to square feet

To convert roods to square feet, multiply the number of roods by 10,890. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply square feet by 0.00009182736455 (rounded).

square feet = roods × 10,890

Example: 10 roods = 108,900 square feet.

About these units

Rood (rood)

Medieval EnglishHistorical unit (no longer in standard use)

A quarter of an acre (1,011.7 m²), 40 square rods. A medieval English land unit, the area of a furlong by a rod.

Old English rod meant a pole, and especially a cross, which is also why the word names the crucifix screens in medieval churches. As a land measure, the rood was the area of a strip one furlong long and one rod wide, which is the same as 40 square rods. That makes it a quarter of an acre, or 10,890 square feet, about 1,011.7 square meters. Its handiness for surveyors came from the simple fractions: four roods to an acre.

The medieval acre was imagined as a strip a furlong long and four rods wide, the ground a team of oxen could plough in a day, so the rood was the strip left when that width was cut into four. Records in England long gave land as acres, roods and perches, in that order. A separate and obsolete use of rood was as a length, with local values somewhere between about 16.5 and 24 feet. By the time the Oxford English Dictionary was compiled in 1914 that sense survived only locally. Normandy had a comparable unit called the vergee.

1 rood = 1,011.714106 square meters (approximately).

Sources: Wikipedia: Rood (unit); Wikipedia: Acre; Wikipedia: Rod (unit)

Square Foot (ft²)

US & ImperialCurrent unit

Exactly 0.09290304 m². The standard unit for floor areas and real estate in the US, UK and India.

Feet came first, and they were not all the same length. As a body-based unit, the foot ranged historically between about 250 and 335 millimeters, with ancient Greek and Roman feet near 300 mm. In medieval England a statute foot was set at 10/11 of an older Belgic foot, and Charlemagne's attempt around 790 to standardize units largely failed. The square foot is simply that length squared, so its size changed along with the foot.

The 1959 international agreement fixed the foot at exactly 0.3048 meter, so one square foot is exactly 0.09290304 m², or 144 square inches. The United Kingdom adopted the new foot in 1964. Today the square foot is the usual way of listing property in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, India, Pakistan, Singapore and Hong Kong, although the measuring convention varies: agents may measure corner to corner, subtract unheated space, or add heated space that extends beyond the end-to-end measurement. The world's smallest park has been reported at 2.6 sq ft.

1 square foot = 0.09290304 square meters (exactly).

Sources: Wikipedia: Square foot; Wikipedia: Foot (unit); NIST Guide to the SI, Appendix B.8: conversion factors

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