dozen
Pluraldozens, dozen
- 1A set of twelve things considered together as one group.
A dozen roses is a traditional gift on Valentine's Day.
He ordered a dozen for the bakery's morning rush.
Note
A borrowing from Old French dozaine, built on doze, "twelve", which goes back to Latin duodecim, literally "two" plus "ten". The plural has two shapes worth keeping apart. After a number or few, dozen stays unchanged: two dozen doughnuts, a few dozen came. Dozens appears when the word stands alone as a unit of packing or counting: pack the shirts in dozens.
- 2A large but unspecified quantity, reckoned loosely in multiples of twelve: more than ten, yet seldom as many as a hundred or two; many.
Like guessing 'hundreds' in a crowd: a comfortable round estimate, not an actual head count.
I've walked past that shop a dozen times without ever going in.
Dozens of letters arrived in the weeks after the article appeared.
Similarscore
Note
Here the word stops counting and starts exaggerating. In this use it is plural and followed by of: dozens of applicants, dozens of different types of gems. Doubling it, as in dozens and dozens, pushes the figure higher still. Compare the exact set of twelve, which drops of after a number. Two dozen eggs means twenty-four, while dozens of eggs means simply a great many.
- 3The number twelve, as called or marked in bingo and similar number games.
When the caller announced a dozen, she completed her top row.
A dozen came up early, giving him a strong start.
Similartwelve
- 4An old English unit for measuring ore, equal to twelve hundredweight.
Each dozen of ore was weighed before being loaded onto the carts.
The foreman recorded two dozen of ore mined that week.
Note
Mining reckoned ore by weight, and here the twelve counts hundredweights rather than items. H.R. Schubert's History of the British Iron and Steel Industry (1957) records the dozen for iron ore holding almost completely constant at twelve hundredweight through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Anyone meeting the word in mining records should read it as a weight, not as a tally of twelve loads.
Practice
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Origin
From Middle English dozen, borrowed from Old French dozaine ("a group of twelve"), formed from doze ("twelve") plus the suffix -aine. This traces back to Latin duodecim ("twelve"), from duo ("two") and decem ("ten").