Paperweight

noun, slang

noun, slang ·3 syllables ·Moderate ·College level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    A small, decorative, somewhat weighty object placed on one or more pieces of paper to keep them from fluttering away.

    "The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone, essentially what today we might term a frameless magnifying glass or plain glass paperweight."

  2. 2
    a weight used to hold down a stack of papers wordnet
  3. 3
    Any object used for this purpose.

    "John used his coffee mug as a paperweight."

  4. 4
    A useless piece of equipment. slang

    "On Windows, the card has a working driver. On Linux right now, it's a paperweight."

Example

More examples

"It's nothing but a glorified paperweight now."

Etymology

From paper + weight.

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