Other forms: heavier, heaviest
Heavy means weighing a lot and hard to lift. A heavy bag, a heavy door, how heavy is it?
It reaches a long way beyond weight. Heavy rain, heavy traffic, a heavy cold, a heavy smoker, a heavy heart, heavy going. In each the word means intense, dense or hard to get through, and the collocations are largely fixed — heavy rain is right and strong rain is wrong. Note heavy-handed, meaning clumsy or too forceful, and that the informal heavy meaning serious or difficult — that was heavy — is common in speech and out of place in writing.
1adjectiveheavyWeighing a lot.
“That box is heavier than it looks.”
synonyms: weighty, hefty
2adjectivegreatGreat in amount or intensity.
“There was heavy rain all weekend.”
3adjectiveexcessDoing something to excess.
“He was a heavy smoker for twenty years.”
4adjectivehardHard to deal with or full of sadness.
“She went back with a heavy heart.”
Too few real examples of this word to estimate which sense is commonest.
heavy is a degree of weight or intensity.
Old English hefig comes from the same root as heave, to lift with effort. A heavy thing is a thing that has to be heaved, which is one of the few English adjectives that names itself by what you have to do about it.
Proto-Indo-European
*kap- — to take, grasp, hold
Proto-Germanic
*habīgaz — heavy, hefty, weighty
Proto-West Germanic
*habīg — heavy, hefty, weighty
Old English
hefiġ
Middle English
hevy
English, today
heavy
Built from
From Middle English hevy, heviȝ, from Old English hefiġ, hefeġ, hæfiġ (“heavy; important, grave, severe, serious; oppressive, grievous; slow, dull”), from Proto-West Germanic habīg (“heavy, hefty, weighty”), from Proto-Germanic habīgaz (“heavy, hefty, weighty”), from Proto-Indo-European kap- (“to take, grasp, hold”). Equivalent to heave + -y. Related to have. Cognate with Scots hevy, havy, heavy (“heavy”), stq heeuwich, häwich (“violent, angry”), West Frisian hevich (“violent”), Dutch hevig (“violent, severe, intense, acute”), German Low German hevig (“violent, fierce, intense, angry”), German hebig (compare heftig (“fierce, severe, intense, violent, heavy”)), Icelandic höfugur (“heavy, weighty, important”), Latin capāx (“large, wide, roomy, spacious, capacious, capable, apt”). Compare typologically объёмный, ёмкий (akin to име́ть, взять).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA