Dessiatine (Noun)
Meaning
A former Russian unit of area equal to 2.7 acres.
Classification
Nouns denoting quantities and units of measure.
Examples
- The Russian aristocrat owned a large estate that spanned hundreds of dessiatines of fertile land.
- In the 19th century, the typical peasant farm in rural Russia consisted of just a few dessiatines of arable land.
- The surveyor carefully measured out the boundaries of the land, calculating its total area in dessiatines.
- After the revolution, the Soviet government seized large tracts of land from the nobility, redistributing it in smaller parcels of one or two dessiatines to peasant families.
- Historians estimate that the average noble estate in pre-revolutionary Russia comprised around 500-1000 dessiatines of land.