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A carat is a unit of mass used for gems, and equals 200 milligrams. The word derives from the Greek keration,fruit of the carob, via Arabic and Italian. Carob seeds were used as weights on precision scales because of their uniform size. In the past, different countries each had their own carat, roughly equivalent to a carob seed. However, in 1907 the metric carat of 200 milligrams was adopted, which is now universally used today.
A carat can also be further divided into points. There are 100 points in a carat.
The carat is a measure of purity of precious metals and other alloys, such as gold. One carat in this sense is one twenty-fourth pure by weight. Therefore, 24 carot gold is pure gold, 12 carat gold is 50% pure, etc. In the United States and Canada, the spelling karat is usually used for the measure of purity, while carat refers to the measure of mass
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