Downweight

noun, verb

noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    The amount of pressure (in grams) required to press a key on a piano. countable, uncountable

    "Piano technicians have to measurements at their disposal for measuring touchweight: downweight and upweight. Downweight and upweight are measured in grams. To measure downweight, a gram weight is placed on the key at the front and a rap or thump is given to the shop bench, KEYBED, or action stack with one's fist to break the starting friction"

Verb
  1. 1
    To give something a lower weight.

    "In addition, both adaptive and robust methods downweight outliers. Note that, if a large sample is taken, the M-estimation procedure will generally downweight some of the largest residuals, even if the error terms were normally distributed."

Example

More examples

"In addition, both adaptive and robust methods downweight outliers. Note that, if a large sample is taken, the M-estimation procedure will generally downweight some of the largest residuals, even if the error terms were normally distributed."

Etymology

From down- + weight.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.