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English around 1300 from . This sprang from the stem of the verb lever, meaning "to raise". The verb, in turn, goes back to , itself from the adjective levis, meaning "light" (as in "not heavy"). The word's primary origin is the Proto-Indo-European stem leg^wh-, meaning "light", "easy", or "nimble", among other things. The PIE stem also gave rise to the English-language antonym of "heavy", "light".

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