Mass

How to spell mass

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce mass

What does mass mean?

1. nounA large, coherent body or quantity of something gathered together.
2. nounThe quantity of matter that an object contains, distinct from its weight.
3. verbTo gather or assemble into a large group or body.
4. nounThe central act of worship in the Catholic and some other churches, including the Eucharist.

Mass in a sentence

• noun

  A dense mass of cloud rolled in from the coast.

• noun

  The experiment measured the mass of each sample on a calibrated balance.

• verb

  Protesters began to mass outside the town hall by midday.

• noun

  The family attended mass every Sunday morning at the parish church.

• noun

  The report sat under a mass of unsorted paperwork.

• noun

  An object keeps the same mass on the moon even though its weight changes.

Where does mass come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word arrives from the Latin massa, meaning a lump, a kneaded dough, or a shapeless heap, which the Romans in turn borrowed from the Greek maza, the word for a barley cake. English picked it up through Old French masse in the 1300s, at first for a coherent body of matter formed into a single bulk. From that idea of a heap or quantity, the meaning broadened to mean any large gathering of people or things, and physics later gave it the precise sense of how much matter an object contains. The religious sense of Mass is a separate word entirely, descending from the Latin missa, the closing dismissal of the church service (from mittere, to send), even though it ended up spelled the same way. Because the word is so short and phonetically regular, its only real trap is the double s, which simply echoes the original Latin spelling.

How the word is built

• mass (from Latin massa: a lump or kneaded dough)