DOZEN
Dozen
A dozen is a grouping of twelve. The dozen may be one of the earliest primitive groupings, perhaps because there are approximately a dozen cycles of the moon or months in a cycle of the sun or year. Twelve is convenient because it has more divisors than other small numbers: 12 = 2 × 6 = 3 × 4 = 1 × 12. The use of twelve as a base number, known as the duodecimal system, probably originated in Mesopotamia . This could come from counting on one's fingers by counting each finger bone with one's thumb. Using this method, one hand can count to twelve, and two hands can count to 144. Twelve dozen are known as a gross; and twelve gross are called a great gross, a term ...The above text is a snippet from Wikipedia: Dozen
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dozen
Noun
- A set of twelve.
- Can I have a dozen eggs, please?
- I ordered two dozen doughnuts.
- There shouldn't be more than two dozen Christmas cards left to write.
- Pack the shirts in dozens, please.
- A large, unspecified number of, comfortably estimated in small multiples of twelve, thus generally implied to be significantly more than ten or twelve, but less than perhaps one or two hundred; many.
- There must have been dozens of examples just on the first page.
- There were dozens and dozens of applicants before the job was posted.
- An old English measure of ore containing 12 hundredweight.
The above text is a snippet from Wiktionary: dozen
and as such is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.