Carats are good for you
Time to get technical - are we talking carat, karat or carrot? All three words are pronounced the same, but have very different meanings. Confusing them when making or buying jewellery - or indeed while cooking - could be an embarrassing and costly mistake.
A carat is a unit of weight used for gemstones (not a unit of size, as is commonly thought), whereas a karat is a unit for measuring the purity of gold. Carat is abbreviated as c. or ct, while karat is properly k. or kt.
Karats, on the other hand, measure the purity of gold, calculated on a base of 24 units. So the purest gold you can get is 24-karat gold (24/24ths gold), whereas 9k gold is just 9/24ths gold.
Incidentally, the root of both ‘carat’ and ‘karat’ is said to be the word ‘carob’, a Mediterranean bean used as a substitute for chocolate (and a crucial ingredient in the carob & orange roulade I used to make in my more Masterchef days, yum). Carob beans are unusual for being consistent in size, so they tend to weigh the same, no matter where grown or when harvested, making them very useful as a unit of weight at least from Ancient Greek times onwards. By the 16th century AD, carob beans were still being used as units of weight by alchemists, called ‘carratus’ in Latin: the modern jewellery terms developed from this usage.
And finally, other words that sound the same. When training for my first proper job (an editor at legal publisher Sweet & Maxwell), I used a ‘caret’ – a little symbol shaped like a hat (^), used to tell a printer to insert a word or phrase from the margin of the proof into the text. Apparently, the word ‘caret’ comes from the Latin for ‘lacking’ (‘carere’ means ‘to lack’).
The other sort of carrot, of course, is the tasty root vegetable that’s said to help with eyesight due to its high vitamin A content… and best enjoyed as carrot cake, in my humble (and cake-loving) opinion.
The root of the word ‘carrot’ lies in the Greek word for ‘head’ – a reminder, perhaps, that you should never eat a piece of carrot cake bigger than your head.
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