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Turn a legal description into plain English
Every rural deed describes land in Public Land Survey System shorthand — quarters of quarters, sections, townships, ranges. It reads like code because it is one. Paste it below and get the translation, the acreage math, and a picture of exactly where that ground sits inside its one-mile section.
Good questions
What do section, township and range mean?+
The PLSS divides most of the U.S. into 6×6-mile townships, located by counting north/south from a baseline (township number) and east/west from a principal meridian (range number). Each township holds 36 numbered one-square-mile sections of 640 acres.
How many acres is a quarter of a quarter?+
40 acres — 640 ÷ 4 ÷ 4. That parcel, the classic “forty,” is the atom of American farmland (“the back forty”). A quarter section is 160 acres; a half is 320.
Why do legal descriptions read backwards?+
They're written smallest-first: “NW¼ of the SE¼” means find the southeast quarter first, then take its northwest quarter. Surveyors read them right to left — and so does this decoder.
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