Word To Use Today: molar.

 We all have molars (or at least, most of us do) but we only tend to think about them when they get holes in them that need mending.

This is a shame, because they are marvels of efficiency and engineering:

Think of a mincing machine. Think of all the faff of getting the thing out of the cupboard and setting it up, then feeding the food into it, then dismantling it and cleaning it and putting it away again.

Then think about eating a piece of meat (or perhaps, for the vegans among us, chewing a liquorice stick).

Yes, they're marvellous thing, are molars.

The word has a neat derivation, too.

Word To Use Today: molar. This word comes from the Latin word molis, which means millstone.

There's another kind of molar, which is to do with chemistry and describes the amount of a substance in terms of its molecules - or, sometimes, in terms of the number of molecules in a measured amount of a solution. That word comes from another Latin word, mōlēs, which means mass.