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What is "dozen"

Crossword clues for dozen

dozen
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
dozen
number
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a round hundred/dozen etc (=a complete hundred etc)
baker's dozen
PHRASES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
a dime a dozen
▪ Jobs like his are a dime a dozen.
▪ Girls are a dime a dozen.
▪ Metaphors of Britain's decline have been a dime a dozen in the post-war years.
▪ Sam told her not to worry, jobs like that were a dime a dozen.
▪ So-called solutions to the longitude problem had been a dime a dozen even before the act went into effect.
half a dozen
▪ About half a dozen women and children had appeared and were standing, holding hands, watching me.
▪ Customer-driven systems also allow individuals to meet their needs in a holistic way, without applying to half a dozen different programs.
▪ He found half a dozen fishermen seated under the palm trees at the foot of the Co-operative quay.
▪ I still do half a dozen or so of these scarlet cross-overs a year, to this day.
▪ Inside the cafe there were half a dozen other people.
▪ Perhaps half a dozen were Hispanic, and the rest, black.
▪ Sunday night he was wild on at least a half dozen.
it's six of one and half a dozen of the other
nineteen to the dozen
▪ Everybody except Jurnet clapped, still talking nineteen to the dozen.
▪ Theories must be abounding nineteen to the dozen.
▪ They often went on excursions, always talking away nineteen to the dozen.
talk nineteen to the dozen
▪ Everybody except Jurnet clapped, still talking nineteen to the dozen.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ Having only one hand, and having that in a dozen things, he has no other to hold out.
▪ I had some memorable test drives after buying a dozen 6R4s when they were up for grabs at the factory.
▪ Prescott, the administration building, looked the same, except that there were a dozen cars parked outside.
▪ The mood is relaxed-very advisable if you have a dozen sheep to get through in a day.
▪ There were a dozen feature films made, with filming lasting from one week to four months.
▪ They live, like their ancestors, in packs of a dozen or so.
▪ We take two dozen blues and a dozen of their predators, the small green crabs that are never far away.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Dozen

Dozen \Doz"en\ (d[u^]z"'n), n.; pl. Dozen (before another noun), Dozens (d[u^]z"'nz). [OE. doseine, dosein, OF. doseine, F. douzaine, fr. douze twelve, fr. L. duodecim; duo two + decem ten. See Two, Ten, and cf. Duodecimal.]

  1. A collection of twelve objects; a tale or set of twelve; with or without of before the substantive which follows. ``Some six or seven dozen of Scots.'' ``A dozen of shirts to your back.'' ``A dozen sons.'' ``Half a dozen friends.''
    --Shak.

  2. An indefinite small number.
    --Milton.

    A baker's dozen, thirteen; -- called also a long dozen.

Related phrases:
Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
dozen

c.1300, from Old French dozaine "a dozen," from doze (12c.) "twelve," from Latin duodecim "twelve," from duo "two" + decem "ten" (see ten).\n

\nThe Old French fem. suffix -aine is characteristically added to cardinals to form collectives in a precise sense ("exactly 12," not "about 12"). The dozens "invective contest" (1928) originated in slave culture, the custom probably African, the word probably from bulldoze (q.v.) in its original sense of "a whipping, a thrashing."

Wiktionary
dozen

n. 1 (context countable English) A set of twelve. 2 (context as plural only always followed by ''of'' English) A large, unspecified number of, comfortably estimated in small multiples of twelve, thus generally implied to be significantly more than ten or twelve, but less than perhaps one or two hundred; many.

Related phrases:
WordNet
dozen

  1. adj. denoting a quantity consisting of 12 items or units [syn: twelve, 12, xii]

  2. n. the cardinal number that is the sum of eleven and one [syn: twelve, 12, XII]

Related phrases:
Wikipedia
Dozen

A dozen (commonly abbreviated doz or dz) is a grouping of twelve. The dozen may be one of the earliest primitive groupings, perhaps because there are approximately a dozen cycles of the moon or months in a cycle of the sun or year. Twelve is convenient because it has the most divisors of any number under 18. The use of twelve as a base number, known as the duodecimal system (also as dozenal), originated in Mesopotamia (see also sexagesimal). This could come from counting on one's fingers by counting each finger bone with one's thumb. Using this method, one hand can count to twelve, and two hands can count to 144. Twelve dozen (12 = 144) are known as a gross; and twelve gross (12 = 1,728, the duodecimal 1,000) are called a great gross, a term most often used when shipping or buying items in bulk. A great hundred, also known as a small gross, is 120 or ten dozen. A baker's dozen, also known as a big or long dozen, is 13. Varying by country, some products are packaged or sold by the dozen, often foodstuff (a dozen eggs). Dozen may also be used to express a large number of items as in "several dozen" (ex. dozens of people came to the party).

Related phrases:

Usage examples of "dozen".

The same women that despised Sky Eyes, that gossiped about her and futilely forbade their sons to come near her, they came for abortifacients, joint easers, the silvery drink that brought one out of a dark mood, a dozen other things.

Stillbirths, abortuses, and placentas are in hot demand at the BLI for the dozen or so groups doing hormone research.

Here he reared a continuous rampart with a ditch in front of it, fair-sized forts, probably a dozen in number, built either close behind it or actually abutting on it, and a connecting road running from end to end.

Leaving a dozen men with buckets, readily filled from the acequia which turned the old water wheel just across the post of No.

By 1940 more than two dozen different crystalline compounds had been prepared from the adrenal cortex.

Nouda the Terrible kept coming up, as did an afrit named Tchue, and something called Faquarl was notable too in a dozen cultures.

There are dozens of Web sites devoted to the manuscript, from the dense and scholarly to the New Agey and fanciful.

The white-on-blue Villerville-sur-Mer sign, the first dozen houses, the Credit Agricole bank had all flashed past when I saw the slip-road open in front of me.

This long letter, written in a bold, flowing hand on a 489 Nineteen hundred and forty-four dozen sheets of bright-blue airmail paper, contained all sorts of information about European people, places and corporations known to Cyrus.

There should be a hitching post, Alan thought, a stagecoach rattling by, a dozen extras milling around.

Presently the canoe came alongside and two or three dozen large albacore were tossed on deck.

Amongst the shoals of smaller sharks there were at least two dozen of the ugly beasts that the islanders called Albacore shark.

Clasping the acrid rag to his face, Alec moved among the dozen or so bodies laid out for inspection.

After a dozen cycles there were billions of allas, one for every person and moldie on Earth -- and that was enough.

Castilian Amoroso its name is - and then you get them to buy it, and then you write to the people and tell them the other people want the wine, and then for every dozen you sell you get two shillings from the wine people, so if you sell twenty dozen a week you get your two pounds.