Weigh

How to spell weigh

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce weigh

What does weigh mean?

1. verbTo measure how heavy something is, typically using a scale or balance.
2. verbTo carefully consider or assess the relative importance of competing factors.

Weigh in a sentence

• Please weigh the parcel before you take it to the post office.

• Managers must weigh the costs against the likely benefits before deciding.

• Nurses weigh each newborn baby shortly after birth.

• The jury will carefully weigh the evidence presented at trial.

Where does weigh come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

Weigh comes from the Old English verb wegan, which originally meant 'to carry, to lift, or to move', and only later narrowed to the idea of lifting something onto a balance to measure its heaviness. It belongs to a broad Germanic family, sharing an ancestor with Dutch wegen and German wiegen, and that same root quietly survives in the everyday words 'wagon', 'wain', and even 'way', all of which carry the notion of carrying or moving. The spelling once contained a guttural sound written with the letters that became our silent -gh, and although English stopped pronouncing that sound centuries ago, the writing system kept the cluster, which is exactly why the word looks heavier than it sounds. The 'ei' order here follows the old form rather than the 'i before e' habit, another reason careful writers pause over it. Its strong link to balance and judgement gave rise by the 1500s to the figurative sense of weighing arguments or evidence in the mind. The homophones 'way' and 'whey' share the sound but not the history, which is the heart of the spelling trap.

How the word is built

• weigh (from Old English wegan: to carry, lift, balance); the silent -gh preserves the old Germanic spelling

Words that sound like weigh

They sound the same but mean different things, so the meaning decides which spelling to write.

• way: A road, path, or route by which one travels from one place to another.