English is a complicated language, ever wonder the difference between carats, karats and carrots?
First, the easy one, carrots. Of course carrots are the orange tuberous root loved by fictional rabbits throughout the ages, as well as promised natural night vision to children everywhere. But because we are always curious here, here are a few lesser known facts about carrots. Carrots are originally from central Asia, and were not orange to begin with, they were likely purple or white. It is likely a common myth that the Dutch developed orange carrots to honor William of Orange. While the Dutch did likely develop orange carrots, as far as we can tell it was not done specifically for the royalty of the Netherlands. However, Texas A&M did develop maroon carrots to represent the Aggies. The myth of carrots helping your night vision was a purposely created subterfuge to help cover one of the biggest tech secrets of World War two, radar. The Germans frequently would bomb England at night, but the British had been developing radar to track incoming Luftwaffe bombers. The British needed to try to find a somewhat plausible explanation for the RAF’s sudden newfound ability to anticipate inbound bombers and shoot them down at night. Its well known that vitamin A is good for eyes, so carrots became the natural panacea for a cover for radar, so the British government carried out a small propaganda campaign pushing the virtues of eating carrots, which caused tremendous night vision. So, like all good lies, there was a small element of truth in carrots helping vision, but also, as a testament to the effectiveness of propaganda, many still believe carrots can still improve night vision.
Carat or Karat? Although Carat and Karat are pronounced the same, frequently used interchangeably, and have the same word origin, they are different. In the simplest definition, both are units of measurement. A carat is a unit of mass measurement, while a karat is a measurement of purity. In an unusual twist of English, according to Webster’s dictionary it is acceptable to use carat or Karat for purity of gold, however Karat is generally considered the most common spelling. Karats are only used to measure gold (although apparently Bruno Mars can measure 24 karat magic) and is in units of 24. Technically all gold that is not 24 karat is an alloy of other metals as well, frequently copper or silver.24 Karat gold is too soft for jewelry, The words karat and carat both originate from the word for a small bean pod of the Carob tree. The seeds were fairly uniform and used a weight in scales weighing precious metals. Karats split off because of the Romans, specifically a Roman coin known as a solidus, which was supposed to weigh exactly 24 Carob seeds.
As if understanding the value of a diamond wasn’t complicated enough, they are measured in a unique weight system. Lets face it, it is clever for marketing, a two carat diamond sounds much more impressive than 400 milligrams diamond! The origin of the word carat shares the exact same etymology as Karat, it was just modified to be a unit of measuring mass. Because of variations in the Carob seeds, the historical weight of a carat varied from 176 milligrams to 220 milligrams. Thankfully your local jeweler today does not have a stash of seeds to determine the weight of the gold, in 1907 the people who decide these things fixed a Karat to a specific weight, 200 milligrams. 2268 Carats make up a pound, so if you are in the market to bulk buy some diamonds that might be a handy figure to know. The largest diamond in the world was the Culliman diamond, which weighed in at a staggering 3,106 carats, well over a pound originally. The stone was cut into a number of smaller stones and is still part of the crown jewels.
One last bonus homonym is a caret, which has nothing to do with the previous three, but is in fact, these little punctuation marks: ‸‸ ‸