Topic summary
Dunam

A dunam (Ottoman Turkish, Arabic: دونم; Turkish: dönüm; Hebrew: דונם; Yiddish: דונאם), also known as a donum or dunum and as the old, Turkish, or Ottoman stremma, was the Ottoman unit of area that roughly represented the amount of agricultural land that could be plowed by a team of oxen in a day. It is analogous in role (but not equivalent) to the stremma in Byzantine Greek units or the acre in the English system. The legal definition was "forty standard paces in length and breadth", but its actual area varied considerably from place to place, from a little more than 900 m (0.22 acres) in Ottoman Palestine to around 2,500 m (0.62 acres) in Ottoman Iraq.
The unit is still in use in many areas previously ruled by the Ottomans. The modern definition is standardized, and the current dunam (or new dunam, metric dunam) is defined as exactly 1,000 m (0.10 ha; 0.25 acres).