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Area

Square metres, acres and hectares.

Area is where a rounding error doubles. Every factor here is a length factor squared, so a figure that is a tenth of a percent out in metres is two tenths out in square metres, and on a floor plate or a field that is a room or a paddock. Two of these units are exact and two are not, and the difference is worth knowing: the square foot and the square inch follow from the international foot of exactly 0.3048 metres, so their factors carry no rounding at all. The acre does not. It is a survey unit inherited from ploughing, its published value is printed to seven figures rather than defined, and it exists in two slightly different versions depending on which foot the survey used. The hectare sits on the other side of that line — exactly ten thousand square metres, a square a hundred metres on a side, with no history to argue about. Every converter here marks which case it is in rather than presenting all four as equally solid.

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How these tools are built

Every tool in this category runs entirely in your browser: there is no upload, no account and no request to a server once the page has loaded. The numbers behind them are transcribed from the organisation that defines them — NIST for units, the W3C for web formats, the WHO for health measures — and each page names its source next to the formula. A tool whose reference values stop reproducing fails the build and does not ship, which is the whole reason the catalogue grows slowly.

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