ball and chain vs weight

ball and chain

noun
  • A heavy iron ball attached to a prisoner's leg by a chain as a means of restraint. 

  • One's wife, as a symbol of restraint. 

  • Anything that restricts one's freedom or opportunities. 

weight

noun
  • An object used to make something heavier. 

  • viscosity rating. 

  • Pressure; burden. 

  • Importance or influence. 

  • An object, such as a weight plate or barbell, used for strength training. 

  • The relative thickness of a drawn rule or painted brushstroke, line weight. 

  • The resistance against which a machine acts, as opposed to the power which moves it. 

  • One pound of drugs, especially cannabis. 

  • The force on an object due to the gravitational attraction between it and the Earth (or whatever astronomical object it is primarily influenced by). 

  • The smallest cardinality of a base. 

  • A variable which multiplies a value for ease of statistical manipulation. 

  • Mass (net weight, troy weight, carat weight, etc.). 

  • The boldness of a font; the relative thickness of its strokes. 

  • Synonym of mass (in general circumstances) 

  • The thickness and opacity of paint. 

  • Shipments of (often illegal) drugs. 

  • Weight class 

  • Mass (atomic weight, molecular weight, etc.) (in restricted circumstances) 

  • A standardized block of metal used in a balance to measure the mass of another object. 

  • The illusion of mass. 

verb
  • To give a certain amount of force to a throw, kick, hit, etc. 

  • To load (fabrics) with barite, etc. to increase the weight. 

  • To load, burden or oppress someone. 

  • To bias something; to slant. 

  • To assign weights to individual statistics. 

  • To handicap a horse with a specified weight. 

  • To add weight to something; to make something heavier. 

How often have the words ball and chain and weight occurred in a corpus of books? (source: Google Ngram Viewer )