Although dictionaries and language reference works point to the sixties as the time when the expression gross came to mean “disgusting,” this word has been around for far more than 40 or 50 years.

William Shakespeare even used it comparing the world to a garden untended and gone to seed and producing only “things rank and gross in nature.”

Gross first appeared in written form in 1380, like so many other words from French, a few hundred years after the arrival of the Normans.

In Latin grossus had meant “thick.”

In French it means “big” and so too does it in a number of English uses such as gross revenue as opposed to net revenue.

But even by 400 or 500 years ago gross food was food of lower quality and to eat grossly was to do so uncleanly and repulsively.

The word was applied to dull and stupid people as well as to things that were of poor workmanship.

Gross in its sense of “bulk” is closely related to our word groceries since we buy our groceries from a grocer who in turn buys them in bulk, or in French en gross.

We could anglicize this French expression into a real English word with a different meaning, engross, but it would still have the same etymology.

The sense of gross meaning “the whole” as we see in gross revenue is extended metaphorically in so that when you are engrossed in something your whole attention is absorbed.

If you go out and buy a gross of something you’ll be coming home with 144 items.  This is because a gross is a dozen dozen and is in fact an abbreviation of the French phrase gross douzaine meaning “big dozen.”