Words for bundles
English still has several words for fixed-size groups: a pair, a dozen, a score, a gross. They sound old-fashioned because they come from a time when goods were counted by hand and sold in standard bundles, long before printed price lists and barcode scanners. Each word is a small piece of evidence about how people counted, which numbers they found convenient, and which they found easy to divide.
The dozen
A dozen is twelve. The word came into English from Old French, where it was a form of the word for twelve, and ultimately from the Latin for twelve. It is one of the most durable group words, and it still appears in egg cartons, in bakery orders and in the phrase “a dozen” used loosely for “several.”
The usual explanation for its popularity is practical. Twelve divides evenly by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12, while ten divides evenly only by 1, 2, 5 and 10. A seller who needs to split a dozen between two, three or four buyers can do so without leftovers. A convenient way to count to twelve on one hand is to use the thumb to touch the three segments of each of the other four fingers, and some writers suggest this contributed to the number’s appeal. That idea is plausible but not proven. Some enthusiasts have argued for duodecimal counting as a whole number system, and the history of money offers a clear example of twelve in daily use: before decimalisation in Britain in 1971, there were twelve pence in a shilling and twenty shillings in a pound, which makes 240 pence to the pound.
The gross and the great gross
A gross is twelve dozen, which is 144. The word comes from the French for “large,” and it appears in the old phrase grosse douzaine, “large dozen.” Gross is a convenient unit for small manufactured items such as buttons, pins, pencils and screws, which merchants traded in bulk long before modern packaging.
The family continues in both directions:
- A small gross is ten dozen, or 120, in some trades.
- A great gross is twelve gross, or 1,728 items. That is twelve times twelve times twelve.
The older “gross” also has an unrelated modern meaning of coarse or disgusting, and in accounting, “gross” means total before deductions. These senses share the idea of “large” or “whole” but are distinct from the counting unit.
The score
A score is twenty. The word seems to come from an Old Norse word meaning a notch or cut, which fits the old practice of cutting a mark in a tally stick, with a larger notch for every twenty items. Counting in twenties is an old habit in many languages, tied to the idea of counting on fingers and toes, and it survives in English in phrases like “threescore years and ten,” used in the King James Bible for a life of seventy years. It also appears in Abraham Lincoln’s “Four score and seven years ago,” which means eighty-seven years, because four times twenty plus seven is eighty-seven.
The score belongs with other patterns of counting by twenty, a habit known from base twenty counting in several languages. French still shows it in the way it says eighty, one of the quirks of French number names.
The long hundred and other oddities
In medieval England and Scandinavia, the word “hundred” could mean 120, now called the “long hundred.” It was used for some goods and counted as six score. Trade customs of this sort show how “a hundred” was once a flexible count, depending on the commodity and the region. Other examples include:
- Quire and ream. Paper has long been sold in quires and reams. A quire was traditionally 24 sheets, and a ream 20 quires, which gives 480 sheets. Modern reams are usually 500 sheets.
- Pair, brace and couple. These words for two have different uses: a pair of gloves, a brace of pheasants, a couple of friends.
- Shock. In some trades a shock meant sixty items, or three score.
The details varied by place and period, and some of these units were regulated by law while others were purely local. A careful reader should treat any single figure as the common one, and not the only one.
What the old units show
Group words reveal how trade worked. Traders counted by hand, in lots that were easy to divide, check and remember. They favoured numbers with many divisors, and they used tally marks that grouped by tens, twelves or twenties. When written numbers and standard weights spread, many of the group words became less necessary, but they remained in the language.
Most of these terms are now traditions rather than tools, and they are worth knowing mainly because they appear in older books, recipes and legal documents. The best-known story about a variation on the dozen, the extra loaf given by bakers, is a legend about thirteen loaves to the dozen and has its own history. Taken together, the dozen, gross and score show that the numbers people picked for everyday counting were often chosen for convenience, and that convenience left traces in the language long after the practice ended.