How big is an iugăr? As much as two oxen plough in a day

The yoke is the wooden beam that sits on the necks of oxen harnessed to a cart or a plough. The Romanian word jug comes straight from Latin iugum, with no detours.

The academic dictionary goes further: in an old regional sense, the jug itself is "the area of land that can be ploughed in a day with a pair of oxen". Tool, team, and working day each took their turn inside the same word.

Everything else follows from that: an iugăr is, at its origin, what two oxen plough in a day.

The Romans wrote the definition down. Varro says a iugum is the area a pair of oxen ploughs in a day. Pliny the Elder adds the technical detail: an actus — 120 feet — is what the oxen plough in one spell, without stopping; two actus lengths make one iugerum.

The Roman reckoning gives 28,800 square feet, about 2,520 square metres: a rectangle twice as long as it is wide, 240 by 120 feet. A quarter hectare worked in a day.

The Transylvanian iugăr is over twice the Roman one. It measures 1,600 square fathoms, and the cadastral square fathom covers 3.5966 square metres. The multiplication gives 5,754.64 square metres — 5,755, rounded. The DEX dictionary rounds differently, to 5,775; the cadastral reckoning stays 5,755.

And 1,600 is a handsome number: 40 times 40. The cadastral iugăr is a square 40 fathoms on a side, which is 76 metres. The village boundary, divided into 76-metre squares — that is what the land books measured.

Not every iugăr was the same. The small Hungarian hold covered 1,200 square fathoms — 4,316 square metres, exactly three quarters of the cadastral iugăr. Local reckonings here and there ran between 1,100 and 1,300 square fathoms; the imperial cadastre fixed 1,600.

South of the Carpathians the measure was called the pogon: about half a hectare, 5,012 square metres — 743 square metres smaller than the Transylvanian iugăr. Another word, another reckoning.

The metric system became law in Romania on 15 September 1864, under Cuza. In Hungary — Transylvania included — the change to metric was decided in 1874 and became compulsory in 1876. Even so, Transylvanian land was divided in 1921 counted in iugăre.

The law of 30 July 1921 for Transylvania, Banat, Crișana, and Maramureș worked from the land books inherited from the Empire — and the land books kept their accounts in iugăre. The allotments were written in the same unit the estates had been measured in.

The dictionaries still list it: the DEX calls it an "old unit of measure", and the literary dictionary quotes prose in which people sell "the four jugăre of land". Two thousand years from the Roman plough to the village auction — measured by the same yoke.