Noun

Singular dozen

Plural dozen when used attributively, dozens otherwise

dozen (plural dozen when used attributively, dozens otherwise)

1. (countable) A set of twelve.

   Can I have a dozen eggs, please?

   I ordered two dozen doughnuts.

   There shouldn't be more than two dozen Christmas cards left to write.

   Pack the shirts in dozens, please.

2. (as plural only, always followed by of) 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.

   There must have been dozens of examples just on the first page.

   There were dozens and dozens of applicants before the job was posted.

3. (metallurgy) An old English measure of ore containing 12 hundredweight.
   • 1957, H.R. Schubert, History of the British Iron and Steel Industry, p. 139

     The dozen as a measure for iron ore remained almost completely constant at 12 cwts. during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Synonyms

• (followed by of: a large number of): a great deal of, a lot of, heaps of, hundreds of, loads of, lots of, many, millions of, scores of, scads of, thousands of

Antonyms

• (followed by of: a large number of): few

Derived terms

• baker's dozen
• Botany Bay dozen
• cheaper by the dozen

• dozenth
• six of one, half (a) dozen of the other

Dozen is another word for the number 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. The dozen is convenient because its multiples and divisors are convenient: 12 = 2 × 2 × 3, 3 × 4 = 2 × 6, 60 = 12 × 5, 360 = 12 × 30. The use of twelve as a base number, known as the duodecimal system (also as dozenal), probably originated in Mesopotamia (see also sexagesimal). Twelve dozen (12 = 144, the duodecimal 100) 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 dozen for each finger on both hands). A baker's dozen, also known as a long dozen, is thirteen.

The English word dozen comes from the old form of the French word douzaine, meaning "a group of twelve" ("Assemblage de choses de même nature au nombre de douze" - (translation: A group of twelve things of the same nature as defined in the eighth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française). This French word [4] is a derivation from the cardinal number douze ("twelve", from Latin duodĕcim) and the collective suffix -aine (from Latin -ēna), a suffix also used to form other words with similar meanings such as quinzaine (a group of fifteen), vingtaine (a group of twenty), centaine (a group of one hundred), etc. These French words have synonymous cognates in Spanish: docena [5] [6] [7], quincena, veintena, centena, etc. English dozen, French douzaine, German Dutzend, Dutch dozijn and Spanish docena, are also used as indefinite quantifiers to mean "about twelve" or "many" (as in "a dozen times", "dozens of people").