Heaviest

How to spell heaviest

8 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce heaviest

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does heaviest mean?

1. adjectiveHaving the greatest weight, or being the most burdensome or intense, of all those compared.

Heaviest in a sentence

• The removal team carried the heaviest box up the stairs last.

• This winter brought the heaviest snowfall the city had seen in decades.

Where does heaviest come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the superlative form of 'heavy', which descends from the Old English 'hefig', meaning 'weighty' or 'burdensome'. That word was built on 'hebban', the ancestor of the modern verb 'heave', so the original sense connected weight with the effort of lifting something up. The same Germanic root gives related words in Dutch ('hevig') and German ('heftig'). Over centuries 'hefig' softened in spelling to 'heavy', and the comparative and superlative endings '-er' and '-est' were added in the regular way. The spelling trap in 'heaviest' is the change of the final 'y' to 'i' before the suffix, which produces the 'iest' cluster that writers sometimes mishandle.

How the word is built

• heav- (root, from heavy)
• -i- (y changed to i)
• -est (superlative suffix)