brotus

Meaning

Something added at no extra charge, such as the thirteenth item in a baker's dozen.

Mitford Mathews suggested in 1951 that the term derived from brot, a northern England dialectal term ultimately derived from Old English brēotan, but Frederic Cassidy notes that this has "no connection to the marketing context" Cassidy mentions that the term might be related to Jamaican Creole braata ("little extra given by a seller to a buyer"), though he considers this "questionable" because "the stressed vowel is rather different [...] and the final -us of the American form would have to be accounted for"; the Jamaican term might derive from a Spanish cognate of Portuguese barato ("favour").

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