Tare

Part of speech: noun, verb

Pronunciation: /tɛə/

Definitions

1. The weight of a container or packaging subtracted to determine net content weight ; a plant of the vetch family, often used as fodder or found as a weed
2. The mass of a container deducted from gross weight to find the actual product weight ; a leguminous plant that grows in fields and is sometimes used to feed animals
3. The allowance for container weight that is removed to calculate pure contents ; a common vetch-related plant known for growing wild or serving as livestock feed

Etymology: The word has three unrelated histories, and the one that matters for the sense "weight of a container" is the Arabic one. Its root, "ṭaraḥa", meant "to throw away", and the derived noun "ṭarḥa" named whatever was thrown off or deducted. Italian merchants took it as "tara", for the allowance made for the packaging when goods were weighed, and French adopted it as "tare" with the same commercial sense. The container's weight is simply what gets thrown away before the goods are counted. Two other English words share the spelling but not this history. One is the plant name for vetch, which comes from Old English "*taru" and reaches back to Proto-West Germanic. The other is borrowed from Japanese "垂れ" (tare), meaning sauce or gravy, which gives English the term for a sauce used in cooking.

Synonyms: deduction, allowance, weight