weight down

present singular third person weights down · participle present weighting down · participle past weighted down · past weighted down

1. To place a weight on, attach a weight to, load with a weight; to encumber with a weight.

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

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

   3 more examples

   […] 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.

   1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter VII, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC

   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

   1957 November 13, Hansard

   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.

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