Weighted

How to spell weighted

8 letters · 2 syllables

How to pronounce weighted

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does weighted mean?

1. verbPast tense of weight: to have made something heavier by adding a load.
2. adjectiveAdjusted so that certain values count for more than others according to their relative importance.

Weighted in a sentence

• verb

  They weighted the tarpaulin with bricks so the wind could not lift it.

• adjective

  The final grade uses a weighted average that favours the exam over the coursework.

• verb

  The fishermen weighted each net to keep it submerged.

• adjective

  The survey produced a weighted score to reflect the larger regions fairly.

Where does weighted come from?

Language of origin: Germanic

This word is built on weight, which descends from the Old English gewiht, meaning a heaviness or a measured load, itself a relative of the verb wegan, 'to lift, carry, or bear'. That verb belonged to a wider Germanic family that also gave English 'wagon', 'wee' (the weighing sense), and even 'wag', all sharing the underlying idea of movement and lifting. The silent 'gh' in the spelling is a fossil of an old guttural sound, once pronounced at the back of the throat, that English speakers stopped voicing centuries ago but kept writing, which is exactly why the word looks so much harder than it sounds. From the noun weight came the verb 'to weight', meaning to add heaviness or to assign relative importance, and 'weighted' is simply its past and participle form, in use from the later medieval period onward. The statistical sense, in which figures are adjusted to reflect differing importance, grew naturally out of that idea and became common in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

How the word is built

• weigh (Old English wegan: to lift, carry)
• -t (forming the noun weight)
• -ed (past tense / adjective suffix)