ounce1
/aʊns
/- Most cohort members reported their offspring's birth weights in pounds and ounces.
- For the cauliflower foam: Melt two and one-half ounces of the butter in a saucepan until foaming.
- For the mushroom rillettes, in a medium saucepan, melt four ounces of butter over medium heat.
- That is an average grade of 2.35 troy ounces per ton!
- Large masses of native gold - up to many hundreds of troy ounces - have been encountered during mining.
- The crew recites the dialogue by heart and mimics the actors without an ounce of embarrassment.
- But if the commentor is right, it would be an even more ridiculous point to make - pure smear, without an ounce of journalistic content.
- The tiny hotel, technically a ‘restaurant with rooms’ as it has only five of them, is a haven of oak-beamed loveliness without an ounce of tweeness to spoil it.
Synonyms
Origin
Middle English: from Old French unce, from Latin uncia 'twelfth part (of a pound or foot)'; compare with inch1.
The unit of weight goes back to Latin uncia, where it meant ‘twelfth part’. In imperial measurement this would have been the twelfth part of a pound, but it is also the basis of inch as the twelfth part of a foot. Ounce is also another name for the snow leopard. This is a quite different word, which originally had an extra letter. In medieval French it was lonce, but the ‘l’ was misunderstood as representing le, the French for ‘the’. The word actually goes back to Latin lynx, the root of lynx (Middle English).
Rhymes
ounce2
/aʊns/Origin
Middle English: from Old French once, earlier lonce (the l- being misinterpreted as the definite article), based on Latin lynx, lync- (see lynx).