Barrel of land
Scandinavian unit of area
A barrel of land (Danish: tønde land, Norwegian: tønneland, Swedish: tunnland, Finnish: tynnyrinala) is a Scandinavian unit of area. The word may originate from the area of fields one could seed with a barrel of grain seeds. The acre is the equivalent Anglo-Saxon unit. Because the barrel sizes varied by country, the area unit does too. One barrel can be approximated as half a hectare.
Per country
Denmark
In Denmark, the tønde was used as an official area unit until the introduction of the metric system in 1907. A tønde was divided in 8 skæpper, a skæppe was divided into 4 fjerdingkar, and a fjerdingkar into 3 album.
Norway
A tønneland was divided in 4 mål. Nowadays, a mål corresponds to 1,000 square meters in everyday speech.
Sweden
The unit was officially surveyed and standardized in the 1630s, and set to 14,000 Swedish square ells, i.e.
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This entry incorporates text from “Barrel of land” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.