Word To Consider Today: nonomole.

 The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said, "Bother!" and "O blow!" and also "Hang spring-cleaning!" and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat. Something up above was calling him imperiously, and he made for the steep little tunnel which answered in his case to the gravelled carriage-drive owned by animals whose residences are nearer to the sun and air. So he scraped and scratched and scrabbled and scrooged, and then he scrooged again and scrabbled and scratched and scraped, working busily with his little paws and muttering to himself, "Up we go! Up we go!" till at last, pop! his snout came out into the sunlight and he found himself rolling in the warm grass of a great meadow.

That is, of course, the wonderful opening paragraph of The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. It has nothing at all to do with the word nonomole, but the word reminded me of The Wind in the Willows, which is, let's face it, recommendation enough.

The mole of a nonomole isn't a furry creature at all, of that I'm sure, though the research I've done into the word tends to suggest that nonomole is actually a rare form (or possibly just a recurring misprint) for nanomole, which is a thousand-millionth of a mole, which would be considerably less than the tip of a whisker.

But what, in that case, is the nonomole kind of a mole?

Well, it's the basic way chemists measure stuff. To be precise, it's a number of particles of one particular kind of thing, which may be an atom, molecule, ion, or electron.

The number of particles in a mole is 6.02214076 x (10 to the 23).

Or, in layman's terms, lots. Even a nonomole is lots.

Moles are apparently useful for all kinds of things, but the one I understand is that you can use them to describe the concentrations of stuff in a liquid. 

I don't know how much salt there is in the liquid in which you tin tuna, for instance, but it should be possible to work this out.

Not if you're me, though.

Thank heavens for chemists. 

(And children's novelists like Kenneth Grahame, too.)

Word To Consider Today: nonomole. Mole in this word is short for molecule, from the Latin mōlēs, which means mass.