Number & MeasureGreek → English
Gram
/ɡræm/noun
A metric unit of mass, one thousandth of a kilogram.
The Greek roots
γράμμα
grámma
letter, small weight
Literally: “a written letter”
Follow a root:γράμμα17 words
The story of the word
Γράμμα means a letter of the alphabet, from γράφειν to scratch, but in late Greek it also named a small weight, roughly a twenty-fourth of an ounce. The French Academy revived that obscure sense in 1795 for the new unit, defined as the mass of a cubic centimetre of water. So the weight and the letter in telegram are the same word, separated by two thousand years of drift.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Late Latin → French → English
- First recorded
- 1797
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
grammartelegramdiagramanagram
In a sentence
The recipe is written in grams, which makes it hard to get wrong.