The dunam, unit of area
The modern dunam is exactly 1000 square meters, a tenth of a hectare. It is the unit in which land is sold and registered in Turkey, Israel and Jordan.
It descends from the Ottoman dönüm, about 919.3 square meters, which stood for what one man could plough in a day. Metrication in the early twentieth century rounded it to a thousand, but the older value is still alive in the West Bank and Gaza, where deeds continue to quote it, and Iraq settled on a third value, 2500 square meters.
The dunam in other units
| 1 dunum | 0.001 km² |
| 1 dunum | 0.1 ha |
| 1 dunum | 10 a |
| 1 dunum | 1,000 m² |
| 1 dunum | 10,000,000 cm² |
| 1 dunum | 0.000386102 mi² |
| 1 dunum | 0.247105 ac |
| 1 dunum | 10,764 ft² |
| 1 dunum | 1,550,003 in² |
| 1 dunum | 1,196 yd² |
| 1 dunum | 1,000,000,000 mm² |
| 1 dunum | 302.5 tsubo |
| 1 dunum | 0.238095 feddan |
| 1 dunum | 0.625 rai |
| 1 dunum | 302.5 pyeong |
| 1 dunum | 5.71429 qirat |
| 1 dunum | 9.88422 guntha |
| 1 dunum | 24.7105 cent |
| 1 dunum | 1.97684 kanal |
Frequently asked questions
How many dunams make a hectare?
Ten exactly, and 4.047 dunams to the acre. A ten-dunam plot is therefore a round hectare, which is why Israeli agricultural statistics still publish yields per dunam rather than per hectare.
Is the Greek stremma a dunam?
The modern stremma also measures a thousand square meters and is the unit Greece counts farmland in. Both descend from the Byzantine stremma, which the Ottoman state took up as the dönüm, and the metrication of the 1920s brought them back to the same round value.
What does a dunam look like on the ground?
A square 31.6 meters on a side. A full-size football pitch of 105 by 68 meters covers 7.14 of them, and a ten-dunam plot fits in a rectangle 100 meters by 100.