weight down

English

Verb

weight down (third-person singular simple present weights down, present participle weighting down, simple past and past participle weighted down)

1. To place a weight on, attach a weight to, load with a weight; to encumber with a weight.
   • 1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter VII, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC:

     […] the fact is that you can't move fast when you are sodden and mudded from head to foot and weighted down with a heavy rifle and bayonet and a hundred and fifty cartridges.

   • 1940, Carson McCullers, chapter 15, in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter‎^[1], Boston: Houghton Mifflin, published 2000, page 321:

     The orchards of peaches with the lush fruit weighting down the dwarfed trees.

   • 1957 November 13, Hansard:

     The Minister of Pensions and National Insurance has been told to carry out a pension reform which destroys National Insurance, which restores the purchasing power of the pension to the 1946 level, but at the cost of weighting down the contributor as never before

   • 1967 January 20, “The Handwriting on the Walls—and Streets”, in Time:

     Last week [the posters] so covered the walls of cities, government buildings and even private huts that the citizens of Canton had to read their messages on the ground, where frustrated Red Guards laid out their latest scribblings and weighted them down with stones.

Anagrams

• downweight