[hev-ee-weyt] 
| 1. | heavy in weight. |
| 2. | of more than average weight or thickness: a coat of heavyweight material. |
| 3. | noting or pertaining to a boxer, wrestler, etc., of the heaviest competitive class, esp. a professional boxer weighing more than 175 lb. (79.4 kg). |
| 4. | of or pertaining to the weight class or division of such boxers: a heavyweight bout. |
| 5. | (of a riding horse, esp. a hunter) able to carry up to 205 lb. (93 kg). |
| 6. | designating a person, company, nation, or other entity that is extremely powerful, influential, or important: a team of heavyweight lawyers. |
| 7. | a person of more than average weight. |
| 8. | a heavyweight boxer or wrestler. |
| 9. | a person, company, nation, or other entity that is powerful and influential: a price hike initiated by the heavyweights in the industry. |
| heav·y·weight (hěv'ē-wāt') n.
|
heavyweight
High-overhead; baroque; code-intensive; featureful, but costly. Especially used of communication protocols, language designs, and any sort of implementation in which maximum generality and/or ease of implementation has been pushed at the expense of mundane considerations such as speed, memory use and startup time. Emacs is a heavyweight editor; X is an *extremely* heavyweight window system. This term isn't pejorative, but one hacker's heavyweight is another's elephantine and a third's monstrosity.
Opposite: "lightweight". Usage: now borders on technical especially in the compound "heavyweight process".
(1994-12-22)
iˌweɪt