Did You Know?
"Ponderous" is ultimately from the Latin word for "weight," namely, "pondus" (which also gave us "ponder" and "preponderance" and is related to "pound"). We adopted "ponderous" with the literal sense "heavy" from Anglo-French "ponderus" in the 15th century, and early on we appended a figurative sense of "weighty," that is, "serious" or "important." But we stopped using the "serious" sense of "ponderous" around 200 years ago -- perhaps because in the meantime we'd imposed on it a different figurative sense of "dull and lifeless," which we still use today.
