cawnie

cawnie noun: a measure of land equal to 57,600 square feet or 1.3225 acres, formerly used in India.

Noun

cawnie (plural cawnies)

(historical) A measure of land equal to 57,600 square feet or 1.3225 acres, formerly used in India.
- This fort of mud was formerly built by the Curumbas, covering forty cawnies of ground with two boundary walls, and was long ruled by them.1838, William Taylor, Examination and Analysis of the Mackenzie Manuscripts, page 83
- If we take the best cotton land, paying a land tax of Rupees 3-5-5 per cawnie, the proportion would be upwards of 33 per cent.1854, John Bruce Norton, A Letter to Robert Lowe, Esq., Joint Secretary of the Board of Controul, from John Bruce Norton, Esq. on the Condition and Requirements of the Presidency of Madras, page 82

We shall now consider the cost of cultivating one cawnie of dry Poonjay land with Indigo by the native cultivator who does not irrigate.1862, An Essay on the culture and manufacture of Indigo, page 17:
On the Nilgiris, the cawnie was initially utilised exclusively in measuring settler occupation.2009, Deborah Sutton, Other Landscapes, page xii:

What does cawnie mean?: Cawnie means a measure of land equal to 57,600 square feet or 1.3225 acres, formerly used in India.
How do you use cawnie in a sentence?: We shall now consider the cost of cultivating one cawnie of dry Poonjay land with Indigo by the native cultivator who does not irrigate.
What part of speech is cawnie?: Cawnie is a noun.
What is the plural of cawnie?: The plural of cawnie is cawnies.

Adapted from Wiktionary: cawnie (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated: 2026-09-02

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