erg

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

• noun An extensive area of desert covered with shifting sand dunes.
• noun The centimeter-gram-second unit of energy or work equal to the work done by a force of one dyne acting over a distance of one centimeter.

from The Century Dictionary.

• noun In physics, the unit of work in the centimeter-gram-second system—that is, the amount of work done by the unit of force, one dyne, acting through the unit of distance, one centimeter.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

• noun (Physics) The unit of work or energy in the C. G. S. system, being the amount of work done by a dyne working through a distance of one centimeter; the amount of energy expended in moving a body one centimeter against a force of one dyne (981 dynes exert the same force as a one gram mass in the earth's gravitational field). One foot pound is equal to 13,560,000 ergs. The absolute Joule is equivalent to 107 ergs, which are equivalent to 0.2389 gram-calories at 15° C. See also mechanical equivalent of heat under equivalent.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

• noun geomorphology A large desert region of sand dunes with little or no vegetation, especially in the Sahara.
• noun The unit of work or energy, being the amount of work done by a dyne working through a distance of one centimeter. Equal to 10−7 joules.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

• noun a cgs unit of work or energy; the work done by a force of one dyne acting over a distance of one centimeter