/tɛr/
[noun] The weight of a container, vehicle, or packaging that is subtracted from the total weight to find the weight of the contents alone. In everyday use, it refers to the empty weight of something before goods or materials are added.
Every time you press 'tare' on a kitchen scale, you are using a word that once sailed the medieval spice routes from Arabic-speaking merchants.
The word 'tare' carries within it the ghost of ancient trade — of merchants weighing saffron and pepper on bronze scales in the souks of medieval Cairo and Alexandria. Its earliest traceable form is the Arabic word 'tarha', meaning 'that which is thrown away' or 'that which is deducted', derived from the Arabic verb 'taraha', meaning 'to throw' or 'to reject'. The logic was beautifully practical: when a merchant weighed a sack of spices, the weight of the sack itself was the part to be 'thrown out' of the calculation — discarded, set aside, so that only the true weight of the goods remained.
From Arabic, the word passed into the commercial vocabulary of medieval Italian traders, who were the great middlemen of the spice trade between the Arab world and northern Europe. In Italian, it became 'tara', keeping its meaning almost perfectly intact. The Italian mercantile city-states — Venice, Genoa, Pisa — were obsessed with precise weights and measures, and 'tara' became a technical term found in their ledgers and trade manuals. It is a fine example of how commerce carries language across cultures even when diplomacy and religion keep peoples apart.
From Italian, the word moved into medieval French as 'tare', and it was from this French form that English adopted it, most likely during the 15th century as English merchants became increasingly engaged in continental European trade. Early written records in English show it appearing in commercial and legal documents relating to the weighing of goods — wool, cloth, grain — where the distinction between the weight of the container and the weight of the contents had obvious financial consequences. Getting this wrong, or manipulating it dishonestly, could mean significant gains or losses in trade.
Interestingly, 'tare' shares its English entry point with a cluster of other Arabic-origin words that arrived via Italian and French trade routes during the same period — words like 'tariff' (from Arabic 'ta'rifa', meaning 'notification' or 'list of fees', through Italian 'tariffa' → French 'tarif' → English 'tariff') and 'average' (from Arabic 'awariya', meaning 'damaged goods', through Italian 'avaria' → French 'avarie' → English 'average'). Together these words paint a picture of how deeply Arabic commercial culture shaped the language of European business.
There is also a second, unrelated 'tare' in English — a word for a type of weed that grows among grain crops, found in the King James Bible in the parable of the wheat and the tares. This 'tare' comes from a completely different root, possibly Middle Dutch or Low German, and refers to the plant 'Vicia hirsuta'. The two words are pure coincidence — a quirk of English where the same sound carries two entirely different histories, one from the sun-baked markets of medieval Arabia and the other from the damp fields of northern Europe. Today, the weighing sense of 'tare' lives on most visibly in the 'tare' button on kitchen and laboratory scales — a small, practical descendant of a word that once moved with silk and spices across the medieval world.