massor

Massor is a Swedish noun that serves as the plural form of massa. In everyday Swedish it denotes a large quantity or bulk, as in massor av människor (lots of people) or massor av tid (a great deal of time). When used in a scientific context, the singular massa refers to the physical property of matter known in English as mass.

Etymology tends to trace massa to the French masse, which in turn derives from Latin massa, meaning lump or bundle. The term has long been used in European languages to describe a quantity of matter or a bulky amount.

In science, massa (mass) is a fundamental property of physical objects. It is a measure of the amount of matter and contributes to inertia, influencing how an object responds to forces. The SI unit of mass is the kilogram. Mass is a scalar quantity and, in classical physics, is treated as being independent of location in space. Gravitational mass and inertial mass are equivalent to a high degree of precision, a principle known as the equivalence of mass. Mass is distinct from weight, which depends on the local gravitational field.

In Swedish usage, massor is widely employed to express abundance in everyday speech, often with the preposition av (massor av saker, massor av tid). The term thus covers both a technical concept in physics and a flexible idiom for describing large quantities in ordinary language.

See also: mass (physical quantity), inertia, kilogram, density.