Heavy

How to spell heavy

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce heavy

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does heavy mean?

1. adjectiveOf great weight; difficult to lift or move, or great in amount, force, or intensity.

Heavy in a sentence

• The removal team struggled with the heavy oak wardrobe.

• Heavy rain flooded the car park within an hour.

Where does heavy come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Heavy descends from the Old English hefig, an adjective meaning 'weighty' or 'burdensome', which was built on the noun hebban, the ancestor of modern 'heave', meaning 'to lift or raise'. The underlying sense is beautifully literal: a heavy thing is something you have to heave. The word traces back to a common Germanic root shared with the Dutch hevig and German related forms, all carrying the idea of weight and effort. Over the centuries the spelling settled with the 'ea' digraph that English uses for the short 'eh' sound, the same pattern seen in 'head' and 'bread', which is exactly the trap, since the word is pronounced 'hev-ee' rather than with a long vowel. From the plain physical meaning it broadened to describe heavy rain, heavy workloads, and heavy hearts, all keeping the original notion of something pressing down.

How the word is built

• heav- (from Old English hefig, weighty)
• -y (adjective suffix)