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'Carat' is the unit of gold purity or the weight of gemstones; 'carrot' is the orange root vegetable.
Side-by-side comparison
"Carat" is a unit of weight for gemstones or a measure of gold purity. A 2-carat diamond, 18-carat gold.
The engagement ring featured a two-carat diamond set in an eighteen-carat gold band.
Pure gold is twenty-four carats, jewellery is often made from eighteen or fourteen carat gold.
The Cullinan diamond, the largest ever found, weighed over three thousand carats.
"Carrot" is the orange vegetable. It has no relation to jewelry or gold, even though they sound almost identical.
She grated fresh carrot into the salad for colour and a hint of natural sweetness.
The management team used a carrot-and-stick approach to motivate the sales force.
Carrots are high in beta-carotene, which the body converts to vitamin A.
Common mistake
"The ring has two carrots" sounds like a joke, but it shows up in writing more than you would think. For gems and gold, only one R: carat, as in "a 24-carat gold chain".
Trick to remember it
- •"Carat" has one R: thin and precise like the measurement unit.
- •"Carrot" has double R, chunky like the vegetable itself.
Quick rule
- •"Carat" = gold purity unit or gemstone weight.
- •"Carrot" = the orange vegetable.
Did you know?
The word "carat" traces to Arabic "qirat" and Greek "keration", the carob seed. Carob seeds were so uniform in weight that medieval merchants used them as weights for gems and gold, the standardised unit survived even after scales replaced seeds. One carat = exactly 0.2 grams. "Carrot and stick" (reward and punishment) comes from the image of motivating a donkey by dangling a carrot ahead and threatening with a stick from behind, the two extremes of motivation, positive and negative.
Practise what you learned
Exercise 1 · Pick the right one
Her engagement ring has a two-_____ diamond. It's beautiful.
Exercise 2 · Pick the right one
She chops a _____ every morning and adds it to her smoothie.
Exercise 3 · Form the word
Related word pairs
One means to receive or agree to something, the other means to exclude or not include.
'Advice' is the guidance you receive (noun); 'advise' is the act of giving that guidance (verb).
'Affect' is the verb meaning to influence something; 'effect' is the noun meaning result or consequence.
'Aisle' is the walkway between rows of seats or shelves; 'isle' is a small island.
Bryan López
Founder of SpeakUP Academy