Here’s a spacious slice of history for you: the acre—a common unit of area—originally referred to the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plow in one day. That’s about 4,840 square yards or roughly 0.405 hectares. It wasn’t a fixed size at first—it varied depending on local customs and terrain!

And here’s a quirky twist: the “barn” is a unit of area used in nuclear physics to measure the cross-sectional area of atomic nuclei. It’s incredibly tiny—1 barn = 10⁻²⁸ square meters—but physicists jokingly named it a “barn” because it was “as big as a barn door” compared to other subatomic scales.