It doesn’t take a mathematician to tell you that 12 does not equal 13. And yet, we often refer to a set of 13 as a “baker’s dozen,” even though “dozen” is clearly defined as “a group of 12.” This confounding term actually makes more sense once you learn its origin story, which can be traced back to the Middle Ages.
Let’s first talk about why certain goods are sold by the dozen. According to The New York Times, the practice comes from a time when shillings — a former form of British currency — were divided into 12 pence (roughly equivalent to pennies). So, many merchants sold individual goods for a single pence, or bulk goods by the dozen for a single shilling, as it made making change easier.
The concept of a baker’s dozen comes from merry old England and its medieval-era commerce. A 13th-century law called the Assize of Bread and Ale regulated the weight of bread and beer to prevent consumers from being ripped off. If a vendor failed to meet the legal standards, they’d be subject to fines or punishments. Breadmakers were so fearful that they’d be fined for selling underweight goods that they’d throw in an extra loaf to meet the minimum weight threshold. The “baker’s dozen” came out of this practice, with 13 items regularly making up an order for a dozen.
While it was a 13th-century consumer protection law, we don’t see evidence of the phrase until a few hundred years later. That’s not to say people weren’t using it until the 16th century — books just weren’t being printed. The Oxford English Dictionary cites one of the earliest references in a 1596 pamphlet from English poet Thomas Nashe: “Conioyning with his aforesaid Doctor Brother in eightie eight browne Bakers dozen of Almanackes.” Later in 1864, “baker’s dozen” was defined in a contemporary slang dictionary as follows: “This consists of thirteen or fourteen; the surplus number, called the inbred, being thrown in for fear of incurring the penalty for short weight.” Nowadays, bakers needn’t fret too much about being penalized, though the idiom (and sometimes the practice) remains in use.
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