makeweight

English

Alternative forms

• make-weight

Etymology

From make +‎ weight.

Noun

makeweight (plural makeweights)

1. Something of inferior quality which is included in a shipment to make up the weight.
   • 1893, Richard Le Gallienne, in a publisher's report on stories by Ernest Dowson, quoted in Jad Adams, Madder Music, Stronger Wine, page 88.

     I would advise you to accept these as an instalment of a volume, (they are not big enough to make one themselves) with the promise that the stories to come should be more striking, more original in theme — not less so, not mere makeweights — than those under consideration.

2. Something included to add to the apparent weight or force of an argument.

   He added a long litany of peripheral precedents which the judge dismissed as mere makeweights.

   • 1951 February, Michael Robbins, “Sir Walter Scott and Two Early Railway Schemes”, in Railway Magazine, page 88:

     Other railway schemes of the earliest period certainly mentioned benefits to agriculture, but only as a make-weight; most of them justified themselves by improved transport of minerals for shipment, […] , or by carriage of bulk loads of manufactured goods.

   • 1964 October 15, Arthur Danto, “The Artworld”, in The Journal of Philosophy, volume 61, number 19, page 584:

     Fashion, as it happens, favors certain rows of the style matrix: museums, connoisseurs, and others are makeweights in the Artworld.

See also

• butcher's thumb
• adjectitious