Word.ws English Dictionary

heavy lifting

heavy lifting noun: the most demanding part of an endeavour; work requiring the most effort, resources, or consideration.

Noun

heavy lifting (uncountable)

  1. (idiomatic) The most demanding part of an endeavour; work requiring the most effort, resources, or consideration.
    • That's what I call the heavy-lifting part of the problem, and that's really where the term genetic caching comes into play.2000 June 5, Cache as cache can (continued under the title WorkFire), InfoWorld, Volume 22, Issue 23, page 60F
    • Alliances are two-way processes and, where we are in agreement, we should not leave it to the United States to do all of the heavy lifting just because they are the world’s superpower.2003 March 18, John Howard, speech to the Australian Parliament
    Synonyms:
    hard yards, lifting
  2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see heavy, lifting.

Examples of heavy lifting in a sentence

  • We want our experts to spend their time on this and do the heavy lifting for us.2010, The 9 Month Investment: A Passive Investors Guide to Achieving 10 Years Worth of Wealth Accumulation in Only 9 Months, page 23:
  • Richard: That's okay, I'll do the heavy lifting.2011 Allen Gregory, "Pilot" (season 1, episode 1)
  • any time there’s emotional heavy lifting to be done, we hear about what happened in passing as opposed to actually seeing how Indy is grappling with his ever-changing world.2023 June 28, Lauren Coates, “Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny review: Harrison Ford goes to the whip”, in AV Club:

Synonyms of heavy lifting

Forms of heavy lifting

alternative formheavy-lifting

Questions about heavy lifting

What does heavy lifting mean?
Heavy lifting means the most demanding part of an endeavour; work requiring the most effort, resources, or consideration.
How do you use heavy lifting in a sentence?
We want our experts to spend their time on this and do the heavy lifting for us.
What part of speech is heavy lifting?
Heavy lifting is a noun.

Words near heavy lifting in the dictionary

  1. heavy industry
  2. heavy ion
  3. heavy ions
  4. heavy legs
  5. heavy lift
  6. heavy lifting
  7. heavy machine gun
  8. heavy machine guns
  9. heavy machinery
  10. heavy man
  11. heavy marching order

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: heavy lifting (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

Last updated:

Pronunciation audio from Wikimedia Commons, each file under its own free license: en-au-heavy lifting.ogg.

Cite this entry: “heavy lifting.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/heavy_lifting. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.