Unit converter

Marla and kanal: two answers, and you need the right one

This is the question the page was built for. Ask how many square feet are in a marla and you will get two different numbers, both confidently given, and both correct somewhere.

• The revenue standard. An acre is 8 kanal and 160 marla, so a marla is 272.25 sq ft and a kanal is 5,445 sq ft — exactly one-eighth of an acre. Most Punjab land records are written this way.
• The urban standard. A marla is 25 square yards, so 225 sq ft, and a kanal is 500 square yards or 4,500 sq ft. Most housing schemes and property advertisements use this.

The gap is 21%. On a ten-marla plot that is 472 square feet — a room. It is not a rounding difference and it is worth being sure about before money changes hands. This converter shows whichever you pick and names it on screen, but the figure that actually governs a transaction is the one written on the registry document, not the one in any calculator.

A murabba, the canal-colony square, is 25 acres on either convention.

Tola, and why it never changes

A tola is 11.6638038 grams — 180 troy grains — and that figure is fixed. What moves is the rupee price of it, which is why this page converts the weight and does not quote a rate. A tola is 12 masha and a masha is 8 ratti, so 96 ratti to the tola.

Seer and maund were metricated: a seer is a kilogram and a maund is 40 of them. The older pre-metric maund was about 37.3 kg, so a figure quoted in an old document is not the same figure as one quoted today.

Three conversions that are not multiplications

Temperature

Celsius and Fahrenheit have different zero points, so they cannot be converted by scaling. 20°C is not twice 10°C, and any converter that divides by a factor produces nonsense below freezing. °F = °C × 9/5 + 32, and the offset is the whole difficulty.

Fuel economy

Litres per 100 km falls as a car improves; miles per gallon rises. They are reciprocals, so converting between them means inverting first. 8 l/100 km is about 29.4 mpg (US) — and there is no factor that turns 8 into 29.4 for every value, which is exactly why this trips people up.

There are also two gallons. The imperial gallon is about 20% larger than the US one, so the same car is quoted at a noticeably better figure in imperial mpg. Both are listed.

Data, and your missing hard-drive space

A drive sold as 1 TB holds a trillion bytes. Your computer divides by 1,024 four times and prints 931 GB — but what it has computed is gibibytes, not gigabytes. Nothing is missing and nobody has short-changed you. The gap is 2.4% at kilobytes and about 10% at terabytes, and it grows with every prefix, which is why both are in the list here.

Questions

Why show every unit instead of just the one I asked for?

Because that is how these get used. Someone checking a plot wants marla, square feet and square yards together to compare against three different documents. Picking one destination and hiding the rest turns one glance into three.

Are the numbers exact?

The definitions are: an inch is exactly 25.4 mm, an acre is exactly 4,046.8564224 m², a pound is exactly 0.45359237 kg. Everything else on the page is derived from those by arithmetic rather than typed in from memory, so the conversions are as exact as the arithmetic allows. Displayed values are rounded to twelve significant figures.

Is anything sent anywhere?

No. It runs entirely in your browser, and nothing you type causes a network request — there is no server behind this page to send it to.

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