Square mile

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The square mile is an imperial and US unit of area equal the area of a square of one statute mile. It should not be confused with miles square, which refers to the number of miles on each side squared. For instance, 20 miles square (20 x 20 miles) is equal to 400 square miles.

1 square mile	=640 acres
=27,878,400 square feet
=2.589988110336 square kilometers (exactly)
≈260 hectares

Symbols

There is no universally agreed symbol but the following are used:

square mile
sq mile
sq mi
sq m (this can be confused with square meter)
mile/-2
mi/-2
m/-2 (this can be confused with square meter)
mile^2
mi^2
m^2 (this can be confused with square meter)
mile²
mi²
m² (this can be confused with square meter)

Square nautical mile

In some contexts, the square miles used for area are nautical miles. In the definition almost always used today, the nautical mile is defined as 1.852 kilometer exactly. Thus,

1 square nautical mile	= 3.429904 square kilometers (exactly)
= 342.9904 hectares
≈ 1.3242933 square statute miles
≈ 36,919,179 square feet
≈ 847.54774 acres

Conversions

1 square mile is equivalent to:

4,014,489,600 square inches
27,878,400 square feet
3,097,600 square yards
640 acres
2560 roods
25,899,881,103.36 square centimetres
2,589,988.110336 square metres
2.589988110336 square kilometres

In the Public Land Survey System of the U.S. and the Dominion Land Survey of Canada, the size of a standard section of land is one square mile, but always with the marginally larger survey definition.

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Last updated on Friday March 14, 2008 at 01:10:54 PDT (GMT -0700)
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