dead weight

dead weight

See also: deadweight

English

Pronunciation

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Noun

dead weight (countable and uncountable, plural dead weights)

1. Unremitting heavy weight that does not move
2. (idiomatic) that which is useless or excess; that which slows something down

   She wants to shed the dead weight of so many stacks of old clutter.

   • 2017 July 23, Brandon Nowalk, “The great game begins with a bang on Game Of Thrones (newbies)”, in The Onion AV Club‎:

     Nobody could ever be bothered to imagine the Sand Snakes beyond personalized weaponry and fake-aggressive quips, none of which were very convincing, and now they don’t even register as dead weight.

Translations

dead weight — See also translations at deadweight

Danish: dødvægt c French: poids mort (fr) m Norwegian: Bokmål: dødvekt m or f, daudvekt m or f Nynorsk: dødvekt f, daudvekt f

Serbo-Croatian: balast (sh) m, mrtav teret m

The translations below need to be checked and inserted above into the appropriate translation tables, removing any numbers. Numbers do not necessarily match those in definitions. See instructions at Wiktionary:Entry layout#Translations.

Translations to be checked

Russian: балла́ст (ru) m (ballást)

Adverb

dead weight

1. (of a shot in snooker or other cue sports) With just enough weight for a ball to drop into a pocket, or come to rest in a precisely determined position.

   He rolled the red in dead weight, and now he's nicely on the blue.

References

• “dead weight” (US) / “dead weight” (UK) in Oxford Dictionaries, Oxford University Press.