Always bothers me that I can't trust 90% of people (myself included) to properly state area, square feet or feet squared, very different scales.
this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2025
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Square feet are feet squared.
3 square feet are 3 1x1 feet, 1/3rd of a square yard. 3 feet squared is a square yard, 3x larger than 3 sqft.
Unless I'm missing your sarcasm.
Also the purpose of this xkcd
Edit to add, a 600 square foot studio apartment (about 3% of an acre) is much smaller than the 600 foot squared lot that a mcmansion will sit on. (About 9 acres)
I believe "feet squared" and "feet, squared" is the discrepancy here.
The unit ft^2 is pronounced "feet squared" and is equivalent to sq. ft.
No need to add the comma if you say it properly, feet squared are not squared feet, quantifier (3) adjective (square) noun (feet) vs quantifier (3) noun (square) affective (feet), it's the order of operations in the English language, one is quantifying the distance of the edge, while the other is quantifying how many individual edges (squares) of set distance (feet) you have.
I am not writing it with any discrepancy, though I do get tripped up when talking about it, but generally nobody calls anyone on it, except that's when expensive projects go boom sometimes.
Read out loud 3sqft and 3'^2,
First one: 3 square feet
Second one: 3 feet (foot? If you're pedantic) squared (square if you're a pedant)
Read out loud "three squared" and 3^2
........
Person behind this account, at this point you're being deliberately dense.
Find something better to do with your time
Those are the exact same thing because they are the exact same thing.
I understand English is difficult to parse, I hope you'll get there some day.
I guess you're the person who this comic is written with thoughts of
Maybe when you're buying real estate or property some day it'll click for you, in the mean time please ask for help before writing units in scientific papers, or interpreting those papers, and definitely don't try to spread the results of those papers to others, lest we end up with world consuming insects.
Highly ironic that you're telling me to find something better to do with my time.
Get a grip, bud.
Did you not notice the unit modifier in the my second phrase???
Let me spell it out for you.
3 (three) ' (feet) ^2 (squared)
You'd have me repeating myself like a monkey, which is, NINE.
3 (three) sq (square) ft (feet) is THREE.
but I suspect you'll disagree at at this point I'll move on, my only sadness is there was a person out there who agreed with your original argument that they were the same.
Tell me what "three plus four squared" is.
19
Nope, forty-nine.
See?
Okay,
There's this thing called the order of operations
And seeing as how you don't know about it, it makes sense that you won't know the difference between square miles and miles squared.
Please check out a junior high school math text book before bothering to argue on the Internet.
Edit i see where you've made the mistake,
If it's (3+4)^2 then you've failed to combine like units, something they teach you about in kindergarten.
No, I was clearly thinking of parentheses when I wrote it, so you should have said them when you said it.
Take your meds, Donnie.
Please read my comment again about combining like units you.....
Nope that's all you get out of me until you remember apples and oranges
Take your meds, Donnie.
My medicine is fighting misinformation, guess what the source of that is here?
I'm not doing this for you, you've shown yourself beyond saving.
I'm doing this for the poor person who read your first comment, said, 'yeah that sounds correct' and gave you an up tick.
My they, and others who stumbled upon it, read through our dialogue here and realize one of us has logic, and the other has "go take your meds".
Nice to see you fall back on the person you're talking with is in need of medication, rather than considering they've made a point you should consider.
I wonder if it's projection, but I shouldn't consider malice when you've repeatedly shown me you're probably just stupid.
Take your meds, Donnie.
Johnny has 3 and 4, Billy wants 2, johnny gave Billy two but billy wanted apples and Johnny only had dollars and bullets,
Fortunately Johnny gave Billy the two bullets so Billy wouldn't have to live in an idiotic world without labeled data
Go back to grade school or pull your head out of your ass, you've either been deprived of an education or you're deliberately ignoring it to bait me into wasting my time teaching you fundamental mathematics.
"the Louisiana purchase added 838,000 square miles to the United States, tell me, was it 1/4 the size of the United States, or the 100x the surface area of the sun?
One of those are square miles, the other is miles squared.
But I don't know why I expect you to understand this now.
Did you mean to type "miles squared?"
Oh, you're just off your meds again.
So TIL. I have never heard of this, and I’m not sure if this happens in the U.K.. I had always assumed, growing up with feet and inches and metres interchangeably, that area is always stated as the length of the side squared is how it is done. Has this happened as a mis-advertising tactic to make things sound bigger than they are?
I think square feet is popular because many things dealt with aren't squares, but a square foot is generally small enough to be a good measure, while also large enough to not be an unreasonably large number. When square feet are too small we move to yards (meters), acres, hectares or miles.
A house or apartment isn't usually square, so how would you apply feet (or meters) squared to it? While a property line might well be equally long on each edge, so you might see it in feet squared, but also that number looks A LOT smaller, so you'll often see square feet or meters
I was briefly fascinated by ‘chains’ at school, in the system of rods, links and chains. The idea of chains was you go around the outside of an irregular area and the number of chains related to the area in acres. 1 acre to 10 square chains?
People who still use body parts for measurement.....
The ones in my garden only eat round inches.
By a square inch, they much mean a column of infinite height extending upwards. Saying they consume the grassy surface of Australia is a dramatic underestimate.
Honestly a special name for area units wouldn't be awful
Hectare
Same goes for volume. People use cubic meters, but I would prefer to use liters instead.
There really is an xkcd for everything.