Hefty

How to spell hefty

5 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce hefty

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does hefty mean?

1. adjectiveLarge, heavy, or substantial in size, weight, or amount.

Hefty in a sentence

• The courier struggled with the hefty parcel of textbooks.

• Speeding through the village earned him a hefty fine.

Where does hefty come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Hefty grows out of the English noun 'heft', which means weight or heaviness and arose in the late Middle Ages as a relative of the verb 'heave', meaning to lift or to raise something with effort. The 'heft' form follows the same pattern as 'weft' beside 'weave' or 'theft' beside 'thieve', where an action word spawns a noun with a -t ending. Adding the common adjective suffix -y produced 'hefty', recorded from the early 1800s, originally in American usage with the plain sense of 'weighty' or 'muscular and solid'. Over time it broadened to describe anything impressively large, from a hefty meal to a hefty fine or a hefty salary. Because the root is the native English 'heft', the spelling is phonetic and regular, with no silent letters to trip a writer up.

How the word is built

• heft (weight, heaviness; from the verb heave)
• -y (adjective suffix meaning 'characterised by')