/weɪ/
[verb] To find out how heavy something is, usually using scales or a balance. It can also mean to think carefully about something before making a decision, like weighing your options.
The word 'weigh' originally meant to carry or move, not to measure heaviness — the scales came later.
The word 'weigh' reaches back to Old English 'wegan', a strong verb meaning to carry, to move, or to transport. Its roots lie in the Proto-Germanic word 'waganą', which itself descended from the Proto-Indo-European root 'wegh-', meaning to go, to move, or to carry. This ancient root had nothing specifically to do with heaviness — it was about motion and the act of lifting something from one place to another. When you carried an object, you naturally felt its weight pressing against you, and from that physical experience, the idea of measuring heaviness slowly grew attached to the word.
The connection to physical measurement came through a very human logic: to judge how heavy something was, you lifted it. Early traders and merchants would heft goods in their hands before placing them on balance scales, and this act of lifting — of 'wegan' — became inseparable from the concept of determining mass. Over time, 'wegan' shifted in meaning from simply 'to carry' toward 'to measure by lifting', and eventually settled into the modern sense of finding out how much something weighs.
The same Proto-Indo-European root 'wegh-' gave rise to an impressive family of English words through different transmission paths. Through Proto-Germanic 'wagnaz' came Old English 'wæġn', which became the modern word 'wagon' — literally a vehicle for carrying things. The root also travelled through Latin, where 'vehere' meant to carry or convey, giving us 'vehicle' directly from Latin 'vehiculum'. Another Latin branch, 'via' meaning road or way — the path along which you carry things — passed through Old French as 'voie' and contributed to the English word 'convey'.
In Old English, 'wegan' also produced the noun 'gewiht', meaning weight — the thing measured when you perform the act of weighing. This evolved into Middle English 'wight' and then settled into the modern form 'weight'. The spelling of 'weigh' itself passed through Middle English as 'weien' and 'weghen', reflecting the gradual shift in pronunciation as English moved from the medieval period into the early modern era. The silent 'gh' in the modern spelling is a fossil of an older guttural sound, like the 'ch' in Scottish 'loch', that was once fully pronounced.
The figurative use of 'weigh' — to consider something carefully, to balance competing ideas — appeared in English writing by at least the 14th century. Writers began to speak of weighing evidence, weighing words, or weighing the consequences of an action, borrowing the image of a physical scale as a metaphor for careful thought and judgment. This mental image proved so powerful and intuitive that it has never left the language. Today, when a judge 'weighs the evidence' or a friend 'weighs their options', they are unconsciously invoking the image of an ancient merchant lifting goods in the marketplace thousands of years ago.