rod

In the English-speaking world, a unit of length used to measure land, at least as early as the 13th - 20th century, = 5.5 yards, (since 1959 in the United States and since 1963 in the UK, = 5.0292 meters exactly). With metrification, the unit now survives as a legal measure only in the United States.

R. D. Connor (1987, page 39) makes a convincing argument, based on measurements of properties described in Saxon documents, that the rod is identical with the Saxon gyrd. Like Grierson, he speculates that the most probable origin of the gyrd's length is the length of twenty natural feet. (In 20th century American male median feet, that would be 208 inches, not much more than the rod's 198, and the feet of 11th century Englishmen were certainly smaller.)

In many contexts the rod is synonymous with the pole and the perch.