| Reference | Drams (dr) | Ounces (oz) |
|---|---|---|
| A sheet of A4 paper (80 gsm) | 2.82192 dr | 0.17637 oz |
| One litre of water | 564.383 dr | 35.274 oz |
| Average adult human | 39506.8 dr | 2469.18 oz |
| A small car | 790137 dr | 49383.5 oz |
The dram is a unit of mass equal to one sixteenth of an avoirdupois ounce, or about 1.7718 grams. Its symbol is dr. There are 256 drams in a pound and 27.34375 grains in a dram, a set of numbers that shows how far the avoirdupois system drifted from tidy arithmetic.
The name descends from the Greek drachma through Latin and Old French, and the same root gives the modern currency of Armenia and the historical coin of Athens. The apothecaries' dram was a different and larger unit, one eighth of a troy ounce or 3.888 grams, and pharmacists used it until the twentieth century. Recipes and old medical texts therefore need reading with care, since an unqualified dram may be either.
Modern survival is narrow but real. Shotgun shells are the best-known case: the dram equivalent printed on a box of cartridges is a legacy figure describing the propellant charge in terms of the black powder that would have produced the same velocity, not the actual weight of modern smokeless powder. American recipes occasionally call for drams, and the unit persists in some descriptions of small hardware and fishing weights.
For everyday purposes the dram is now a curiosity, kept alive by its appearance on packaging and in older texts rather than by any working need. Where precision matters the same quantity is stated in grams, and where tradition matters the word survives without its arithmetic being examined too closely.
Two other drams complicate the picture. The apothecaries' dram, used in pharmacy until the twentieth century, was one eighth of a troy ounce and weighed about 3.888 grams, more than twice the avoirdupois dram described here. The fluid dram is a measure of volume rather than mass, one eighth of a fluid ounce, and it still appears on the graduations of old medicine glasses and on some American pharmacy equipment. A recipe or a formula written before the metric era therefore has to be read with its system identified first, because the same word can mean two different masses and a volume, and nothing in the notation distinguishes them.
One dram equals about 1.7718 grams, one sixteenth of an ounce, or 27.34375 grains.
The ounce is a unit of mass equal to one sixteenth of an avoirdupois pound, or exactly 28.349523125 grams. Its symbol is oz, from the Italian onza. It is the everyday small weight of the United States and remains in common use in the United Kingdom alongside metric units.
There are several ounces, and confusing them is easy. The avoirdupois ounce described here is the one used for food and general goods. The troy ounce, used for gold, silver and platinum, is about 31.103 grams, some ten per cent heavier, which is why a troy pound of twelve ounces weighs less than an avoirdupois pound of sixteen. The fluid ounce is not a mass at all but a volume, and the imperial and US fluid ounces differ from each other by about four per cent.
American food packaging is built on the ounce. Net weights appear in ounces below sixteen and in pounds and ounces above, and recipe quantities for cheese, chocolate, pasta and meat are given the same way. Postal rates for letters step in ounces, and boxing, wrestling and other weight-class sports state limits in pounds and ounces.
The word comes from the Latin uncia, meaning a twelfth part, which is also the ancestor of the inch. That original twelfth survives in the troy ounce but not in the avoirdupois one, whose sixteenth-of-a-pound relationship came later from the wool trade of medieval Europe. Two units with the same name and different arithmetic is the direct result.
Precious metals are the other ounce's territory. Gold, silver, platinum and palladium are priced per troy ounce of 31.1035 grams, about ten per cent heavier than the avoirdupois ounce used for groceries, and every quoted bullion price in the world refers to it. A one-ounce gold coin is therefore heavier than an ounce of butter, and a bar described as a kilogram contains 32.15 troy ounces rather than 35.27 ordinary ones. The troy system also keeps its own subdivisions, with 20 pennyweights to the ounce, which is why a jeweller's scale and a kitchen scale are calibrated differently even when both are marked in ounces.
One ounce equals 28.349523125 grams exactly, one sixteenth of a pound, or 437.5 grains.