makeweight

plural makeweights · alternative make-weight

1. Something of inferior quality which is included in a shipment to make up the weight.

   1 more example

   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.

   2 more examples

   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.

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

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

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