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Glite Dictionary
north forty

north forty

9.8
A piece of land about forty acres on the north side of a farm
  • noun
  • US
translation icon : norte cuarenta
  • The north forty was the most fertile part of the farm, ideal for growing vegetables.

Examples

  • After lunch, we took a stroll through the north forty to check on the crops.

  • The farmer decided to plant corn in the north forty this year.

  • It will be hours, and besides, he's in the almond orchard on the north forty, seven miles away.

    Fiction book (1990)

Surface Forms

north forty singular

Morphology

north + forty

The phrase can be parsed compositionally as 'north' + 'forty', so a learner could plausibly infer 'the forty (units) on the north side' — i.e. a tract of land to the north. However, the use of 'forty' as a noun meaning 'forty acres' and the region-specific agricultural usage in American English are not fully predictable from the constituents alone, so full understanding requires cultural or lexical knowledge.

Etymology

The noun north forty comes from old American farms where land was often split into forty-acre pieces, so the north piece was simply called the north forty. So today north forty means 'a piece of land of about forty acres on the north side of a farm'.