quarter section
1
7.4
- noun
- /ˈkwɔrtər ˈsɛkʃən/
- Specialized
:
cuarto de sección
- This is a quarter section of old pasture laid out along the river bottoms.
Examples
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Each small, square quarter-section has one or more hog farms, which are clusters of two to ten buildings.
Academic text (1997) -
A quarter section is a lot of land, particularly when you've shaped every inch of it yourself.
Fiction book (2002) -
Folks, each quarter section is marked.
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Again, each quarter section is marked.
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It's all divided up into quarter sections.
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The U-District quarter section map is particularly crazy.
Blog text (2) -
There are also the official quarter section maps which will show any relatively recent changes (past couple of decades).
Blog text (2) -
I want a young farmer, homesteading a quarter section.
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Congress did not implement Powell's ideas, leaving the 160-acre quarter section as the standard land unit.
Academic text (2007) -
The farmer bought a quarter section of land to expand his fields.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'quarter' = one fourth and 'section' = a one-square-mile land parcel, so a learner who knows both can infer it denotes one fourth of a section (typically 160 acres). It is a technical term in land measurement but follows a straightforward numeric+unit pattern common across languages, making it transparently derivable.
Etymology
The term quarter section comes from dividing a square of land one mile on each side called a section into four equal parts called quarters, so each quarter section was a smaller square of land of about 160 acres. So quarter section means that particular 'piece of land' made by splitting a larger section into four.