Other forms: weighted, weights, weighting
Weight is how heavy something is. The number on the bathroom scales, the reason you swap the shopping bag from hand to hand, the thing the airline measures at check-in.
A weight is also an object chosen for being heavy: the weights you lift at the gym, a paperweight holding the bills down on a windy desk. Figuratively, weight is importance — her word carries weight, the weight of the evidence, a decision with real weight behind it. Mind the verb: you weigh yourself, while to weight something means to add weight on purpose, as in a weighted blanket or a weighted average. Physicists split weight from mass, so your mass on the Moon is unchanged and your weight is a sixth of what it is here. And it sounds exactly like wait, which is where it goes wrong in writing.
1nounweightHow heavy a person or thing is.~75%
“The parcel is just over the weight limit for a single stamp.”
2nounobjectA heavy object, especially one used for exercise or for holding something down.~5%
“He put a weight on the corner of the map so the wind would not take it.”
3nouninfluenceImportance or influence.~10%
“Her name at the bottom of the letter gave it weight.”
4verbheavierTo make something heavier on purpose, or to give one part of a total more importance than another.~10%
“The final mark is weighted towards the written exam.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 20 sentences found in the wild and placed 20 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
weight is a measure of heaviness.
Weight goes back to Old English wiht and ġewiht, from Proto-Germanic *wihtiz. The Proto-Indo-European root behind it, *weǵʰ-, meant to move, pull, draw, drive. Weigh grew from the same place, so heaviness was first named by the effort of shifting the thing.
Proto-Indo-European
*weǵʰ-
Proto-Germanic
*wihtiz
Old English
wiht
Middle English
weight
English, today
weight
Built from
From Middle English weight, weiȝte, weght, wight, from Old English wiht, ġewiht (“weight”), from Proto-Germanic wihtiz "weight"; compare weganą (“to move”), from Proto-Indo-European weǵʰ- (“to move; pull; draw; drive”). Equivalent to weigh + t. Cognate with Scots wecht, weicht (“weight”), stq Wächte (“scale”), Gewicht (“weight”), West Frisian gewicht (“weight”), Dutch gewicht (“weight”), German Low German Wicht, Gewicht (“weight”), German Wucht (“massiveness, force”), Gewicht (“weight”).
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA