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Today, an acre is generally considered to be a unit of land measuring 43,560 square feet (4,047 square meters). Before that standard was set, it's believed that an acre represented a rougher measurement: the amount of land that could be plowed in one day with a yoke of oxen. Both acre and agrarian come from the Latin noun ager and the Greek noun agrós, meaning "piece of land; field." (You can probably guess that agriculture is another descendant.) Agrarian, first used in English in the 16th century, describes things pertaining to the cultivation of fields, as well as to the farmers who cultivate them.
Examples of agrarian in a Sentence
Elizabeth Stamp, Architectural Digest, 29 Apr. 2025
The South, for its part, responded in kind: secession swiftly forged a fractured region into a reactive unity, bound by fear of emancipation and faith in a mythic agrarian freedom.
—Adam Gopnik, New Yorker, 21 Apr. 2025
Adam M. Silver, The Conversation, 22 Apr. 2025
The Eldon house that Wood depicted, built in 1881, wasn’t the ancestral home of sturdy agrarians.
—Daniel Immerwahr, The New Yorker, 16 Oct. 2023
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Cite this Entry
“Agrarian.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/agrarian. Accessed 7 May. 2025.
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