Other forms: hefting, hefted
To heft is to lift something to judge how heavy it is. Heft the axe, hefted it in his hand, heft the bag.
It is lifting for information rather than to move something, which is the whole word — you heft a tool to see whether it is right for you. As a noun, heft means weight, and figuratively it means substance: an argument with real heft. Note hefty, meaning big and weighty.
1verbheftTo lift something to judge how heavy it is.
“He hefted the suitcase and decided it was too heavy to carry upstairs alone.”
2nounweightWeight or substance.
“I could tell from the heft of the parcel that it was full of books.”
heft is a lifting or a weight.
Middle English heft comes from heven, to lift, plus -th, on the pattern of weft from weave. Heave is the same root.
Middle English
heft — heaviness; something heavy, a weight
English, today
heft
Built from
The noun is derived from Late Middle English heft (“heaviness; something heavy, a weight”), from heven (“to lift, raise”) + -th, by analogy with the development of weft from weven (modern English weave), etc. (also compare words like cleft from cleave, and theft from thieve, where the development occurred in Old English or earlier languages). The English word is analysable as heave + t. The verb is probably derived from the noun.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA