gram: [18] Gram, or gramme as it is sometimes spelled, was borrowed at the end of the 18th century from French gramme, the term adopted in 1799 as the basic unit of weight in the metric system. The word itself goes back via late Latin gramma ‘small unit’ to Greek grámma (source of English grammar), which originally meant ‘letter of the alphabet’ but later came to be used for ‘small weight’. => grammar
gram (n.)
also gramme, metric unit of weight, 1797, from French gramme (18c.), from Late Latin gramma "small weight," from Greek gramma "small weight," a special use of the classical word meaning "a letter of the alphabet" (see -gram). Adopted into English about two years before it was established in France as a unit in the metric system by law of 19 frimaire, year VIII (1799). "There seems to be no possible objection to adopting the more convenient shorter form, except that the -me records the unimportant fact that the word came to us through French" [Fowler].
双语例句
1. A few twentieths of a gram can be critical.
即使重量仅有1克的二十分之几都可能是关键性的。
来自柯林斯例句
2. A Chinese speech recognition method based on character - based N - gram model is proposed in this thesis.