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heft

Pronunciation: /hɛft/

The English word “heft” has 20 meanings listed here.

noun

  1. The feel of the weight of something; heaviness.
  2. The force exerted by an object due to gravitation; weight.
  3. Graveness, seriousness; gravity.
  4. Importance, influence; weight.
  5. The greater part of something; the bulk, the mass.
  6. An act of lifting; a lift.
  7. An act of heaving (lifting with difficulty); an instance of violent exertion or straining.
  8. A piece of pastureland which farm animals (chiefly cattle or sheep) have become accustomed to.
  9. A flock or group of farm animals (chiefly cattle or sheep) which have become accustomed to a particular piece of pastureland.
  10. A number of sheets of paper fastened together, as to form a book or a notebook.

verb

  1. To lift or lift up (something, especially a heavy object).
  2. To test the weight of (something) by lifting.
  3. To evaluate or test (someone or something).
  4. To have (substantial) weight; to weigh.
  5. To accustom (a flock or group of farm animals, chiefly cattle or sheep) to a piece of pastureland.
  6. To establish or settle (someone) in an occupation or place of residence.
  7. To establish or plant (something) firmly in a place; to fix, to root, to settle.
  8. Of a thing: to establish or settle itself in a place.
  9. To cause (milk) to be held in a cow's udder until the latter becomes hard and swollen, either by not milking the cow or by stopping up the teats, to make the cow look healthy; also, to cause (a cow) to have an udder in this condition.
  10. To cause (urine) to be held in a person's bladder.

Etymology

The noun is derived from Late Middle English heft (“heaviness; something heavy, a weight”), from heven (“to lift, raise”) + -th (suffix denoting a condition, quality, state of being, etc., forming nouns), by analogy with the development of weft from weven (modern English weave), etc. (also compare words like cleft from cleave, and theft from thieve, where the development occurred in Old English…

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Definitions are from Wiktionary, extracted by Kaikki.org, and are available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.