What Does the Term Carat Weight Mean?
The weight of a diamond is expressed in fractions or multiples of a carat, to work this into a more familiar measurement that you can understand one carat is equal to 200 milligrams. The word carat came to the English language from French, derived from the Greek keration, “fruit of the carob”. This is because in past centuries, different countries each had their own carat unit, but all were roughly equivalent to the mass of a carob seed. These units were also often used for weighing gold. Obviously carob seeds are not a measurement that could be accepted today, which lead to the modern definition of the weight of a carat which has been standardized to be equal to exactly 200 milligrams. This measurement is known as the metric carat, and it was adopted universally from 1907. This ‘metric carat’ is the measurement used for all diamonds you can buy today. The metric carat can be further split into 100 grains of 2 milligrams each. It is interesting to note that in the far east where the ca
