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For Carat as a unit of purity see Carat (purity)
The carat is a unit of mass used for gems. The word derives from the Greek keration (fruit of the carob), via Arabic and Italian. In the past, different countries each had their own carat, roughly equivalent to a carob seed (in effect carob seeds were used as weights on precision scales, because of their uniform size). However, in 1907 the metric carat of 200 milligrams was adopted, which is now universally used today.
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