1The weight of an inert person or thing.

1. 1.1 A heavy or oppressive burden.
   she'd drag my father's dead weight from wherever he'd fallen

   Example sentencesExamples

   • When Sumit Sarkar published his path-breaking textbook on modern India in 1983, he helped lift the deadweight of the old clichéd guides.
   • And they mustn't be impeded by the deadweight of regulation that this Labour Government has imposed.
   • The danger is that those who come to Britain to work hard, get educated and better themselves and their families risk being dragged down by the deadweight of sections of the indigenous population.
   • His mother's vow that he would join the priesthood should he be cured appears to have created a deadweight of responsibility on a child's consciousness.
   • We must instead place our selves and our present day existence where they rightfully belong, in the center of our universe, and shake off the dead weight of the past.
   • Those ubiquitous institutions which act in all organisations like a deadweight on actually getting things done?
   • We have to abandon the enormous deadweight of the materialism of the Western tradition, and turn to a more planetary way of thinking.
   • ‘The amount of time that you have to put into filling out these forms is another deadweight on the economy,’ says Americans for Tax Reform President Grover Norquist.
   • There needs to be careful strategic thinking of the ways in which positive social currents can overcome negative resistances and the dead weight of habit.
   • To Colley, the past is not a deadweight impeding progress.
   • But it can be an enormous deadweight on U.S. power, as we saw earlier this year.
   • The solution is a complete purge of all the deadweight.
   • A radical force for equality or a deadweight of political correctness?
   • In this way, I argue, the notion of tradition might function, not as a dead weight, but as a genuinely inspirational element in the future development of the contemporary music scene.
   • If he didn't get the trade out of Boston that he sought, he'd become a deadweight around the clubhouse until his contract expired at the end of this campaign.

   Synonyms

   burden, unwanted responsibility, encumbrance, load, onus
2. 1.2 The total weight of cargo, stores, etc. which a ship carries or can carry.
   this will produce a maximum dead weight of 72,350 tons

   Example sentencesExamples

   • Some 500 tonnes of deck cargo can be carried, giving a deadweight of about 1,300 tonnes at the maximum draft of 5.1m or around 800 tonnes at the design draft of 4.2m.
   • The other vessel is the Forest Champion, a handy size vessel with a deadweight of 26,472 tonnes.
   • A large cruise ship may have a deadweight of as little as 7000 tons, while a very large oil tanker may have a deadweight of more than 300000 tons.
   • This buoyancy supports most of the deadweight of floating cargoes, so that typically only a minor portion of the deadweight is carried by the vessel.
   • The net registered tonnage of a ship roughly corresponds to 40 per cent of its deadweight.
   • The LMZ Artemis has a summer deadweight of 69,714 tonnes, 83,000 tonne displacement, is 228 metres long and has draft of 12.1 metres.
3. 1.3
   another term for dead load

   Example sentencesExamples

   • In summary, the load used for settlement analyses must consist of the actual dead weight of the structure, and in many cases, will also include live loads.
   • The horizontal pressure on the wall from the backfill is countered by the deadweight of the concrete and of the backfill material pressing down upon its broad base.
   • Finally, there is a limit for the dead weight of the structure if the structure is going to be floated out.
   • This requirement need not be applied to a story where the dead weight above that story is less than 10 percent of the total dead weight of the structure.
4. 1.4Farming mass noun Animals sold by the estimated weight of saleable meat that they will yield.
   Example sentencesExamples

   • We sell deadweight most of the time with the odd foray into live markets.
   • There is a definite shortage of good lightweight heifers and I notice that the Scottish auctions averaged 108p/kilo liveweight last week, which is round about 180-185p deadweight.
   • Currently farmers receive around £1.45 per kilo deadweight for their lambs which averages around £25 - £30 per head; and is well below profitable production levels.
   • At this level, any pig producer selling deadweight should be diverting some of his production into the live market to take advantage of the situation.
   • Many farmers are reluctant to sell deadweight and sheep selling does lend itself more readily to the live auction.
5. 1.5Economics usually as modifier Losses incurred because of the inefficient allocation of resources, especially through taxation or restriction.
   a dead-weight burden

   Example sentencesExamples

   • In fact, it is estimated that the economy incurs a $67 billion deadweight loss each year that is directly attributable to traffic delays.
   • This is an economic rent to the council and a deadweight loss to society, as it's an incentive to use parking less efficiently.
   • It's not clear to me that the income from the richest 5% could have been redirected towards the poorest 20% without some deadweight loss in income.
   • And taxation to support government insurance programmes has a high deadweight loss.
   • However, if that is not the case, prices in the U.S. will increase, imposing a classical deadweight loss (from trade reduction) on the U.S.
   • Firms face a deadweight cost if, having increased their training investments, their staff move on to other companies.
   • It represents a large deadweight cost and would not be a good use of public funds.
   • It is putting a huge deadweight cost on the small businesses that are trying to produce the wealth, the jobs, and trying to keep this country going.
   • For jobs where the curriculum is unrelated, the entire cost of the course of study, in time and money, is a complete deadweight loss imposed by this law.
   • However, it is likely that an increasing proportion of those who remain on the payroll are not engaged in productive work leading to increasing deadweight losses.
   • Moreover, we have shown that this process maximizes the welfare to society by reducing any deadweight loss associated with an inefficient inter-regional spatial pattern of labour.
   • Yet we haven't even begun to grapple with the huge economic dead weight of epidemic welfarism, which is costing us $36 million a day.
   • We do what we can to efficiently weed out this deadweight cost, but it still consumes manpower and money that would otherwise be dedicated to serving paying customers.
   • All the studies done on taxation show that the higher the marginal tax rate, the higher the deadweight costs of the tax system.
   • But we reject any such market, and we don't budge when an economist observes that prohibiting free transfer generates deadweight loss.
   • It's pure deadweight administrative loss to them.
   • Where these products generate inconvenience or lower utility to the consumer, and yet save the producer nothing, a deadweight loss is generated.
6. 1.6usually as modifier A debt not covered by assets.
   Example sentencesExamples

   • Where Government borrows to invest in social infrastructure this is called deadweight debt.
   • The Golden Rule will yield benefits for future generations (reproductive debt) and will discourage irresponsible spending on deadweight debt.
   • It will be a matter of future government policy, but certainly they would go a long way toward wiping out the deadweight debt of the province.
   • Moreover, monetary policy has the great virtue, when used as a stimulus, of not leaving behind a mass of deadweight debt to be serviced from the public purse.