Word.ws English Dictionary

dunam

/ˈdʊn.əm/

dunam noun: an Ottoman Turkish unit of surface area nominally equal to 1,600 square (Turkish) paces but actually varied at a provincial and local level according to land quality to accommodate its colloquial sense of the amount of land able to be plowed in a day, roughly equivalent to the Byzantine stremma or English acre.

Noun

dunam (plural dunams)

  1. (historical) An Ottoman Turkish unit of surface area nominally equal to 1,600 square (Turkish) paces but actually varied at a provincial and local level according to land quality to accommodate its colloquial sense of the amount of land able to be plowed in a day, roughly equivalent to the Byzantine stremma or English acre.
    • You pay eight marks and they plant a dunam of land for you with olives, oranges, almonds or citrons.1922 February 2, James Joyce, Ulysses, Paris: Shakespeare and Company […], →OCLC
  2. A modern Turkish unit of surface area equal to a decare (1000 m²), equivalent to the modern Greek stremma.
  3. Various other units in other areas of the former Ottoman Empire, usually equated to the decare but sometimes varying (as in Iraq, where it is 2500 m²).

Synonyms of dunam

  • stremma
  • old stremma
  • Turkish stremma
  • Ottoman stremma

Forms of dunam

pluraldunams
alternative formdonum
alternative formdunum

Origin of dunam

From Hebrew דּוּנָם (dúnam) or Arabic دُونُم (dūnum), from Turkish dönüm, from dönmek (“to turn”). A probable calque of Byzantine Greek στρέμμα (strémma, “stremma”, literally “that which is turned”).

Questions about dunam

What does dunam mean?
Dunam means an Ottoman Turkish unit of surface area nominally equal to 1,600 square (Turkish) paces but actually varied at a provincial and local level according to land quality to accommodate its colloquial sense of the amount of land able to be plowed in a day, roughly equivalent to the Byzantine stremma or English acre.
What part of speech is dunam?
Dunam is a noun.
How do you pronounce dunam?
Dunam is pronounced /ˈdʊn.əm/.
What is the plural of dunam?
The plural of dunam is dunams.

Words near dunam in the dictionary

  1. Dunajec
  2. Dunajská Streda
  3. Dunakeszi
  4. dunal
  5. Dunalley
  6. dunam
  7. dunamis
  8. dunams
  9. Dunapoor
  10. Dunapore
  11. Dunar

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: dunam (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:

Cite this entry: “dunam.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/dunam. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.