Weighing

How to spell weighing

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce weighing

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does weighing mean?

1. verbMeasuring how heavy something or someone is, typically using scales.
2. verbCarefully considering or balancing options before making a decision.

Weighing in a sentence

• The nurse was weighing the newborn before the parents took her home.

• She spent the weekend weighing the costs and benefits of the new job.

• The cashier kept weighing the loose vegetables at the checkout.

• The committee is still weighing whether to approve the budget.

Where does weighing come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This is the present participle of the verb 'weigh', which descends from the Old English wegan, meaning 'to carry', 'to bear', or 'to move'. The same Germanic root gave us 'wain' (a cart) and lies behind 'wagon' and 'way', all sharing the underlying idea of carrying or moving a load. The sense narrowed over time from carrying a burden generally to measuring how heavy that burden is, since you lift or bear something to judge its mass. The tricky spelling comes from the silent 'gh', a relic of an old guttural sound that Middle English once pronounced; the 'ei' vowel pattern (against the usual 'i before e' habit) is what most often trips writers up. By extension the word also took on the figurative meaning of carefully considering or balancing one thing against another, as if placing ideas on a set of scales.

How the word is built

• weigh (Old English wegan: to carry, bear, weigh)
• -ing (present participle/gerund suffix)