Ton

How to spell ton

3 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce ton

What does ton mean?

1. nounA non-metric unit of weight, equal to 2240 pounds in Britain or 2000 pounds in the United States.
2. nounInformally, a very large quantity or number of something.

Ton in a sentence

• A short ton in the United States equals two thousand pounds.

• She had a ton of paperwork to finish before the deadline.

• The lorry was carrying just under a ton of crushed stone, measured in the old imperial system.

• There was a ton of traffic on the motorway this morning.

Where does ton come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

The word goes back to the Old English tunne, meaning a large cask or barrel, a sense shared across several early Germanic and medieval Latin forms (tunna). A full tun of wine was a standard trading unit, and because such a cask held a fixed, very heavy volume of liquid, the name drifted from the container to the weight of what it held. By the late medieval period English writers were using 'ton' for a large unit of weight, while the older spelling 'tun' survived for the cask itself. The metric system later borrowed the same word from French as 'tonne' for the 1000 kilogram unit, which is exactly why 'ton' and 'tonne' are now confusable homophones in writing. The short spelling 'ton' therefore preserves the older, non-metric tradition, where 'tonne' marks the modern metric measure.

How the word is built

• ton (from tunne, a large cask or barrel used as a unit of capacity)

British and American spelling

Ton is the American spelling. British English spells it tonne.