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mesouschrist t1_jbknh16 wrote

Forty__ gave a great answer. But just to add a more general conclusion. "Specific" usually means "per quantity of that thing." It doesn't necessarily need to be mass - although the two examples you gave are per mass. "Specific gravity" is a fancy word for density - or mass per volume.

And yeah its a horrible word. Doesn't make any sense with the normal English definition of specific. Old science terms are often bad science terms in modern English.

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Sharlinator t1_jblw5pl wrote

> And yeah its a horrible word. Doesn't make any sense with the normal English definition of specific. Old science terms are often bad science terms in modern English.

I'd guess it's a bit too literal translation from the German spezifisch which means "specific", "particular", but also "intrinsic", which is much closer to the actual meaning. (For a long time, German was the lingua franca of physics.)

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BezoomyChellovek t1_jbkymnz wrote

Specific gravity is the ratio of the density of something relative to that of water. So water has a specific gravity of 1, while something more dense than water has a specific gravity greater than 1. This also means that specific gravity is unitless, while density is not (e.g. kg*m^-3)

But agreed that "specific" usually means per something or relative to something.

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