Square Meters to Dunams (m² to dunam)

1 square meter equals 0.001 dunams exactly.

1 square meter = 0.001 dunams

How to convert square meters to dunams

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

dunams = square meters × 0.001

Example: 10 square meters = 0.01 dunams.

About these units

Square Meter (m²)

Metric (SI)Current unit

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

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.