acre; wiseacre

Definition 
The Sumerian agar meant a watered field, a word the first farmers in Babylonia formed from their word a for water and applied to fertile watered land in the river valleys. Agar—related to the Sanskrit ajras, an open plain—came into Latin as ager, "fertile field," and finally entered English as acre or acras in the 10th century. The word first meant any unoccupied land but then came to mean the amount of land a yoke of oxen could plow from sunup to sundown. During the reign of Edward I, it was more fairly and accurately defined as a parcel of land 4 rods in width and 40 rods in length (a rod measures 16½ feet). The area remains the same today except that the land does not have to be rectangular, that is, 4×40 rods. In case you want to measure your property another way, in the United States and Great Britain an acre equals 43,560 square feet, or 1/64 th of a square mile, or 4.047 square meters. One old story says that Ben Jonson put down a landed aristocrat with "Where you have an acre of land, I have ten acres of wit," and that the gentleman retorted by calling him "Mr. Wiseacre." Acreage doesn't actually figure in this word, however. Wiseacre has lost its original meaning, having once been the Dutch wijssegger, "a wisesayer, soothsayer, or prophet," apparently an adaptation of the Old High German wizzago, with the same meaning. By the time wijssegger passed into English as wiseacre in the late 16th century, such soothsayers with their know-it-all airs were already regarded as pretentious fools.