Lots for Sale

The English word lot has been on a lot of journeys.

I remember selling lots of comic books on eBay. I don’t mean a ton of comics, but instead I mean the term of art that is better understood inside auction houses than anywhere else.

I didn’t know what lot really meant in this world at first, but I picked up enough context to play the game: LOT OF 50 80s X-MEN COMICS might be a headline. I also had no idea that this version of the word lot was much closer to the origin of the word than the way we use it most of the time.

If you go back to Old English, you find a word hlot, which described something people would draw out of a hat or from inside of a bag in order to determine what you got from a deal. The version of this I played as a kid was drawing straws; whoever ended up with the shortest straw had to sit out the game or do the dirty work.

This is where the phrase drawing lots comes from. If you drew the right hlot, you might walk away with a lot of stuff, meaning the portion assigned to you by the gods, or by God, or by fate.

You can probably imagine how people naturally began using phrasing like the lot you’ve drawn, your lot in life, the whole lot, and the lot of it.

Now, at an auction, it is sometimes more practical to sell multiple items at once, especially if you’re closer to the wholesale source of the thing you’re selling. Someone like me would look to resell individual items purchased at auctions in lots. By the 1700s, lot had become a formal term of art in the auction business. That’s the way I was using the word during my Power Selling heyday.

There are lots of words that have sprung from this word.

You might get an allotment of stock if you work at a big company. The lottery ultimately decides who gets what lot of prizes. A lot of land is your share of all the land parceled out from a much larger tract—your lot, if you will. A parking lot is one of these parcels used just for cars.

By the 1800s, a lot had become a placeholder for describing so many things that it simply began to describe things. What kinds of things? All of them. You could have a lot of anything.

I hope to see a lot of comments on this one.