Weight

How to spell weight

6 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce weight

What does weight mean?

1. nounHow heavy something is, measured as a quantity; also the importance or influence of something.
2. verbTo add heaviness to something, or to assign relative importance to a factor.

Weight in a sentence

• noun

  The package's weight surprised me.

• verb

  Engineers weight the base of the crane for stability.

• noun

  He's been trying to lose weight since Christmas.

• verb

  The formula will weight recent sales more than older figures.

Where does weight come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word comes from the Old English wiht, later gewiht, meaning 'amount that something weighs', which was built on the verb wegan, 'to carry, lift, or weigh'. That older verb pictured the literal act of bearing a load on a balance, and it is the same root that gives us 'weigh' and even 'wain' (a heavy cart). The spelling kept its tricky 'gh', once pronounced as a throaty sound that has long since gone silent in English, which is why the word now sounds exactly like 'wait' yet looks so different on the page. The 'ei' order and the silent 'gh' are the heart of the spelling trap, both inherited from the Germanic ancestors shared with Dutch 'gewicht' and German 'Gewicht'. Modern senses, from physical heaviness to the idea of importance or influence, all grow naturally from that original notion of how much something presses down.

How the word is built

• weigh (to measure heaviness)
• -t (noun-forming suffix)

Words that sound like weight

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

• wait: To stay where one is or delay action until a particular time or event.