It’s one of the first things you learn in chemistry: Atoms and molecules are so small that even a few grams of a substance contains so many atoms or molecules that counting them by the billions or trillions is just as pointless as counting them one by one. Chemists therefore use a unit called the mole. One mole of molecules of water, for example, contains 6.022140758 x 1023 molecules. That long number is called Avogadro’s number after the early 19th-century Italian scientist Amadeo Avogadro. The mass of one mole of something in grams is the mass of that substance in atomic mass units. One atomic mass unit (amu) is very nearly equal to the mass of the proton and the neutron. The amu itself is defined as one-twelfth the mass of an atom of carbon-12, which has six neutrons and six protons. Therefore, the mass of one mole of carbon-12 atoms is 12 grams.
Despite the chemical unit’s name being pronounced like the name of a small underground mammal, the real origin of the term is much more straightforward—it has to do with molecules. In his 1865 textbook Introduction to Modern Chemistry, the German chemist August Wilhelm von Hofmann noted that since the Latin for mass was moles and the Latin for a little mass was molecula, one could use these terms to distinguish between the two types of changes that a substance undergoes—those visible to the naked eye, like water boiling on a stove, and those happening at the small, molecular scale. Since the small, microscopic action was at the molecular level, he dubbed the large, visible action the molar level.
However, von Hofmann did not use mole as a unit; he used it just as a category. In 1900 another German chemist, Wilhelm Ostwald, in Basics of Inorganic Chemistry, gave the definition above, that when the atomic or molecular weight of a substance is expressed in grams, that mass is one mole of that substance. A few years later the French physicist Jean Perrin dubbed the number of units in one mole Avogadro’s number.