grosse douzaine

Gross as a quantity comes from the French grosse douzaine, meaning 'large dozen.' A dozen is twelve. A gross is twelve dozen — 144. A great gross is twelve gross — 1,728. The word grosse in this context means 'large' or 'bulk,' not 'disgusting.' The English borrowed the word in the fifteenth century as a term of trade: merchants who sold in bulk ordered by the gross.

The number twelve was the backbone of medieval counting. Twelve pence in a shilling. Twelve inches in a foot. Twenty shillings in a pound. The dozen and the gross were natural multiples in a world that divided by twelve. The reason for base-twelve preference may be practical: twelve divides evenly by 2, 3, 4, and 6, while ten divides evenly only by 2 and 5. For merchants splitting goods into portions, twelve was more useful than ten.

Eggs were sold by the dozen and the gross. Pencils were sold by the gross. Buttons, nails, screws — any small manufactured item ordered in bulk was counted by the gross. The 144-unit packaging persisted well into the twentieth century. Office supply catalogs in the 1960s still listed pencils and pens by the gross. The number 144 was not arbitrary; it was the natural bulk unit in a twelve-based commercial system.

Metrication and decimal counting have almost eliminated the gross from commerce. Eggs are still sold by the dozen, but almost nothing is sold by the gross anymore. The word survives mostly in the phrase 'gross domestic product' — where gross means total or before deductions — and in the adjective meaning disgusting, which comes from a completely different Latin root (grossus, meaning thick or coarse). Two unrelated words merged in English and are now impossible to separate.