Ounce

How to spell ounce

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ounce

What does ounce mean?

1. nounA unit of weight equal to one sixteenth of a pound (about 28 grams).
2. nounA very small amount of an abstract quality, such as effort or sense.

Ounce in a sentence

• The recipe calls for one ounce of grated cheese.

• She put every ounce of energy into finishing the report.

• The jeweller weighed the gold to the nearest ounce.

• The plan needed just an ounce of common sense to succeed.

Where does ounce come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The everyday weight sense of ounce comes from the Latin uncia, which literally meant 'a twelfth part'; it was the twelfth division of a Roman pound and also of the foot. English took it through Old French unce or once during the 1300s. The very same Latin uncia is the direct ancestor of 'inch', so the unit of length and the unit of weight are long-lost twins from one root, which is why both once described a twelfth share of something larger. The English spelling kept the soft 'c' and the silent ending of its French source, giving the slightly surprising 'ounce' rather than a phonetic spelling. There is also a quite separate animal called the ounce, an old name for the snow leopard, which reached English by a different route: the Old French 'l'once' was wrongly split off from a word descended from Latin lynx, the lynx, and the stray 'once' drifted into English as a big-cat name.

How the word is built

• ounce (from Latin uncia: a twelfth part)