To lift or carry something heavy, or the weight and heaviness of an object.
From Old Norse 'hefja' meaning to lift or raise. The word entered English around the 1500s and originally meant to lift with effort, evolving to also describe the quality of being heavy.
Heft is one of those words where the sound matches the meaning—it has a solid, weighty sound that feels heavy in your mouth, just like the objects it describes. This is called onomatopoeia's cousin, where the phonetic quality mirrors the semantic meaning.
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