Dozens

How to spell dozens

6 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce dozens

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does dozens mean?

1. nounGroups of twelve, or loosely a large, unspecified number of things.

Dozens in a sentence

• Dozens of emails arrived while she was on holiday.

• The bakery sold several dozens of bread rolls before noon.

Where does dozens come from?

Language of origin: French

The word traces back to the Latin duodecim, which simply meant 'twelve', built from duo 'two' and decem 'ten'. That form passed into Old French as dozeine or douzaine, a collective noun meaning 'a group of twelve', and English borrowed it in the 1300s as 'dozen'. The plural 'dozens' developed naturally and quickly took on the looser sense of 'a large but unspecified number', the way we might say 'tens' or 'hundreds'. The spelling keeps the soft 'z' sound that French gave it, and although it looks irregular against its Latin ancestor, the link survives in related words such as 'dual' and 'December', which was once the tenth month of the early Roman calendar.

How the word is built

• dozen (group of twelve, from Latin duodecim)
• -s (plural)