Science & TechnologyGreek → English
Mass
/mæs/noun
A quantity of matter with no definite shape, and in physics the measure of how much matter a body contains.
The Greek roots
μᾶζα
mâza
barley cake, kneaded dough
Literally: “kneaded lump”
Follow a root:μᾶζα2 words
The story of the word
Latin massa, a lump of dough, comes from Greek μᾶζα, the coarse barley cake that was ordinary Athenian food, with wheat bread as the luxury. English took it as a shapeless lump in the fourteenth century, and Newton turned it into a measurable quantity in the Principia, defining it as quantity of matter and prising it apart from weight. The church service called Mass is a different word, from Latin missa in the dismissal ite, missa est.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
In a sentence
Mass stays the same on the Moon; weight does not.