Square Kilometers to Dunams (km² to dunam)

1 square kilometer equals 1,000 dunams exactly.

1 square kilometer = 1,000 dunams

How to convert square kilometers to dunams

To convert square kilometers to dunams, multiply the number of square kilometers by 1,000. This factor is exact. To go the other way, multiply dunams by 0.001.

dunams = square kilometers × 1,000

Example: 10 square kilometers = 10,000 dunams.

About these units

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

Dunam (dunam)

Middle EasternTraditional unit (still used in some regions)

Exactly 1,000 m² in the modern metric standard. Older Ottoman dunams varied by region, from about 900 to 2,500 m².

Ottoman Turkish dönmek means to turn, and the dunam probably follows the Byzantine Greek stremma, a land measure of similar size. Its legal definition was forty standard paces in length and breadth, but the real area differed from province to province, from just over 900 square meters in Ottoman Palestine to about 2,500 in Ottoman Iraq. Roughly it matched the land an ox team could plough in a day.

Today the metric dunam is standardised at exactly 1,000 square meters, a tenth of a hectare, and that is the figure used here. It is the working unit in Israel, Palestine, Syria, Iraq and Turkey, and the Balkan dunam is mostly the same, with local exceptions such as about 1,600 square meters around Leskovac in Serbia. Under the British Mandate the dunam was 919.3 square meters until the metric version was adopted in 1928. Cyprus lists its donum at 1,338 square meters, and the old Ottoman stremma in Greece is given as about 1,270.

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

Sources: Wikipedia: Dunam

Related conversions

See all area units.