WEIGHT

I. noun Etymology: Middle English wight, weght, from Old English wiht; akin to Old Norse vætt ~, Old English wegan to weigh Date: before 12th century 1. the amount that a thing weighs, b. the standard or established amount that a thing should weigh, one of the classes into which contestants in a sports event are divided according to body ~, poundage required to be carried by a horse in a handicap race, 2. a quantity or thing weighing a fixed and usually specified amount, a heavy object (as a metal ball) thrown, put, or lifted as an athletic exercise or contest, 3. a unit of ~ or mass, a piece of material (as metal) of known specified ~ for use in weighing articles, a system of related units of ~, 4. something heavy ; load , a heavy object to hold or press something down or to counterbalance, 5. burden , pressure , the quality or state of being ponderous, corpulence , 6. relative heaviness ; mass , the force with which a body is attracted toward the earth or a celestial body by gravitation and which is equal to the product of the mass and the local gravitational acceleration, 7. the relative importance or authority accorded something , measurable influence especially on others , overpowering force, the quality (as lightness) that makes a fabric or garment suitable for a particular use or season, a numerical coefficient assigned to an item to express its relative importance in a frequency distribution, the degree of thickness of the strokes of a type character, see: importance II. transitive verb Date: 1647 to oppress with a burden , 2. to load or make heavy with or as if with a ~, to increase in heaviness by adding an ingredient, 3. weigh 1, to feel the ~ of ; heft , to assign a statistical ~ to, to cause to incline in a particular direction by manipulation , to shift the burden of ~ upon