TARE. We hardly know whether all the words tare, fret, cloff, suttle, gross, net, are still used in commerce ; they all hold their places in works of arithmetic. Tare is said to be the allowance for the weight of the box or bag in which goods are packed; fret, an allowance of 41h. in I04 lb. for waste ; doff, an allowance of 21b. in 3 cwt., that the weight may hold good when sold by retail; the gross weight, that of the goods and package all together ; the 'Tuttle weight, that which re mains when tare only is allowed ; the net weight, that which remains when all allowances are made. We shall merely state what we know of these words.
Thre (written tam in some of our older arithmetical works) is made from the Italian tarare, to abate. In that language tara is a technical term implying abatement of any kind, not for weight of package only. We believe clog' to have been the English word which originally stood for the allowance for package : in our older arithmeticians, tare and clothe generally go together, and the latter seems to be for the package, the former for other abatements. Clojr or dough is defined in an old dictionary as that wherein any thing is pnt for carriage sake. Hum plirey Baker (1562) speaks only of tare and Odle ; Masterson (1592), of tars, clothe, and trot, but the first two terms are used together. We
cannot find doff used in the sense given to it by our modern books of arithmetic until about the end of the 17th century.
Ted seems to be from the Italian tritare, to crumble. Stevinus, in his Latin treatise on book-keeping, uses intertrimentam in the sense of deduction from the quantity charged for. Gross weight needs no ex planation ; the Italian form netto was formerly used for net weight. It being well known that these terms generally come to us from the Italian, we must suppose suttle to he from soltile, which is used in the sense of fine and valuable, and is applied to the finer part, as separated from the coarser. One of our old writers (Masterson, Arithmetike,' 1592) uses suttle weight in a manner which makes us imagine we see the origin of the hundred weight being a hundred and tlrelve pounds. Without any explanation, as if it were matter of notoriety, he con trasts 'Tuttle and arerd opals weight, the former having 100 lbs. to the hundredweight, the latter 112 lbs. In the rougher sort of goods, at the same period, the tare was (as appears by the tables they give) very often I2 lbs. in I12 lba. : perhaps then the hundredweight of 112 lbs. was only an allowance for the weight of the box, barrel, or other package.