The word gross entered the English language in the mid-14th century as an adjective and through the Old French gros ‘thick, strong, coarse’, which roots stem from the late Latin grossus ‘thick, coarse’ (of food and mind) and which later moved to the Medieval Latin with the meaning of ‘great, big’.
The word develop several and different senses in the English language, starting from its appearance, as during its first century of existence different records use it in the meaning of ‘evident, easy to understand’ (in The English works of Wyclif, circa 1380: “Holiness of life teaches rude men by gross examples”); ‘course, load voice’ (in 1398, in John Trevisa’s translation of the early encyclopaedia On the Properties of Things: “Males have a grosser voices in all manner of kind of beasts.”); ‘thick, massive’ (in John Lydgate’s Secretes of old Philosophers, mid 15th century).
In the following century the adjective gross came out with the additional senses of ‘not sensitive, dull stupid’ (1520s), ‘vulgar, coarse in a moral sense’ (1530s), ‘fragrant, monstrous’ (1580s).
The most-common sense of ‘entire, total of an amount, value or weight, as opposed to net’ is firstly recorded in print in 1523, in John Fitzherbert’s The Book of Husbandry: “And therefore he that byeth gross sale, and retail, must nedes be a winner.
As a noun, the word gross entered the English language at nearly the same time, through the Old French idiom grosse douzaine ‘large dozen’ to stand for a dozen dozen, or a group of 144 (12×12) items.
In parallel, the noun named the measure of weight equal to one-eighth of a dram, or a hundred gross equalling to 112 lb, firstly attested in print in 1659, in Thomas Willsford’s The scales of commerce and trade; and Architectonice, or the art of building: “In all Commodities where a hundred gross is mentioned, it is 112 lb.”
The Gross National Product (GNP), to name the market value of all the products and services produced during a specific period of time by the citizens of a country came out as a main indicator of the level of a nation’s economic activity in the mid-1940’s.
In the recent decades, the Gross Domestic Product (the GNP minus the income from foreign sources plus the income paid to foreign citizens and entities), calculated either by measuring all income earned within a country, or by measuring all expenditures within the country, came to rule the economic scene.
But there we have Bhutan, a country which rejected the GDP as an indicator to measure progress and which in 1971, instead, adopted a new approach to development, the Gross National Happiness (GNH) which measures country’s prosperity based on the spiritual, psychical, social and environmental health of its citizens and natural Environment.
