English

Alternative forms

• dessiatine
• dessjatine
• desyatin
• desyatina

Noun

dessiatina ‎(plural dessiatinas or dessiatiny)

1. A Russian measure of land, roughly 1.1 hectares.
   • 1849, "The Observatory at Pulkowa", The North American Review, Volume 69, Issue 144, July 1849:

     The tract of land given by the emperor contains five hundred and forty-five acres, (twenty dessjatines,) being two thousand two hundred and five feet long, and one thousand five hundred and eighty-two wide at its greatest breadth.

   • 1918, Aylmer and Louise Maude, translating Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, Oxford 1998, p. 166:

     I go shooting there every year, and it is worth five hundred roubles a desyatina cash down, and he is paying you two hundred on long term.

   • 1973, Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow:

     Clouds, some in very clear profile, black and jagged, sail in armadas towards the Asian arctic, above the sweeping dessiatinas of grasses […].

   • 1996, Orlando Figes, A People's Tragedy, Folio Society 2013, p. 119:

     The average peasant allotment, at 2.6 dessyatiny in 1900, was comparable in size to the typical smallholding in France or Germany.

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