Grain or girl here. I'm In Yon Fogarty, your friendly guide to the English language. Today, we're

going to talk about why we use the phrase baker's dozen and how to make words that end in O plural.

I recently encountered the phrase baker's dozen and wondered where it came from. Well,

first, a dozen is 12, and the word goes back to the Latin duodecima, which was formed from the

words for 2 and 10, so it also meant 12. But a baker's dozen is 13. So what is going on? Were old-time bakers so generous that they

threw in an extra rolls so often that if you bought 12 rolls, you'd always get 13? Well, not exactly.

You might get an extra loaf, but not because of generosity. In medieval England, bread was a staple food, and bakers were subject to strict laws about price and weight. For example, a law called the Assize of Bread and Ale Act set standards for the weight and quality of both bread and ale. It was actually the very

first British statute that regulated the sale of food. And bakers who sold underweight loaves

faced harsh penalties, including fines, flogging, and even time in a pillory. Different kinds of bread, like whole wheat

bread versus a finer bread called Wastel, had different standard weights. And the price of a loaf also

fluctuated with the price of wheat. But since the weight of bread can also vary due to things like

moisture loss during baking and cooling,

bakers may have sometimes added an extra loaf when they sold them by the dozen,

so they wouldn't accidentally short-change customers and risk punishment.

The practice was especially common when bakers sold to middlemen who would resell the bread. In this case,

the 13th loaf also gave these intermediaries a profit margin. The earliest citation in the Oxford

English Dictionary for Baker's Dozen is from 1596, and the more literal 13 to a dozen shows up in print

around the same time, but the practice

itself is believed to be older. The phrase devil's dozen for 13 also exists, and Anatoly Lieberman,

writing for the Oxford University Press blog, says it could be because bakers had bad reputations and people referred to them

as devils. But interestingly, Lieberman says that, quote, some Germanic and romance languages

have no special name for 13, while others have. When such a name exists, the reference is always

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