The Dozen Variations

Over in the #tildetown IRC we were discussing the dozen and its variations. Along with the traditional baker’s dozen, skalnik mentioned the long dozen and metric dozen. Here is a full listing of the dozens variations.

• Half-dozen: 6. Self-explanatory, really.
• Baker’s half-dozen: 7. Gotta throw in that extra one (see baker’s dozen).
• Metric dozen: 10. Blame the French.
• Short dozen: 11. Don’t bring up its height, it has a complex.
• Dozen: 12. The original: often imitated, never duplicated.
• Baker’s dozen: 13. Bakers threw in an extra to avoid heavy penalties.
• Long dozen: 14. Webster lists “long dozen” as 13, but it’s already got a name. Besides, 14 is longer.
• Texas dozen: 15. Everything is bigger in Texas.
• Dobizen: 16. Like kibibyte for 1024 bytes.
• Gross: 144. A dozen dozens. I like to think it’s like Terry, not disgusting. Unless you eat that many donuts, I guess.

This page will be updated as more dozen variations are discovered. Have you found one? Contact me!

Further reading

XKCD (of course) has a comic about baker’s units. Tangerine over at neocities came up with baker’s dozenal, which is as grand as you’d imagine.