Tons

How to spell tons

4 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce tons

What does tons mean?

1. nounA very large quantity or number of something (informal).
2. nounMore than one ton, the unit of mass used to weigh heavy loads.

Tons in a sentence

• There are tons of emails waiting in my inbox after the holiday.

• The loaded lorry weighed several tons before it reached the depot.

• The new flat gives us tons of storage space for our books.

• The crane can lift up to twenty tons of steel at once.

Where does tons come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the plural of 'ton', which traces back to the Old English 'tunne', meaning a large cask or barrel, the same source that gives us the word 'tun' for a wine vessel. The unit of weight grew out of that container sense: a 'ton' originally referred to the space a standard barrel occupied or the weight of liquid it held, so a measure of capacity gradually hardened into a measure of mass. The Old English word itself was borrowed from Medieval Latin 'tunna', a barrel, which may in turn have Celtic roots. The closely related spelling 'tonne' (the metric unit) arrived much later through French, but the plain English 'ton' kept its short spelling. The informal use meaning 'a great quantity', as in 'tons of work', has been common since the nineteenth century and simply borrows the idea of huge weight.

How the word is built

• ton (a large unit of weight)
• -s (plural)

British and American spelling

Tons is the American spelling. British English spells it tonnes.