# Weight
In NetHack, weight is a measure of an item's heaviness. Carrying too much weight will increase your encumbrance, rendering you burdened, stressed or possibly worse depending on the size of your load - fighting while significantly encumbered is not advised, as excessive weight lowers you speed.
NetHack expresses item weight in aum, short for "arbitrary unit of measurement". Normally, the only case where the game explicitly tells you an item's weight is when you purchase a glob of pudding from a shop. In wizard mode, however, your inventory displays the weight of each carried item.

List of item weights
The following table below lists the weights of a few common items and a couple of monsters from lightest to heaviest, with all weights given in aum. Monsters have no specific weight while alive (they are instead classified by size), but their corpses do.

Item

Weight (aum)

100 gold pieces

1

gem

1

ring

3

scroll

5

wand

7

luckstone

10

tripe ration

10

lizard corpse

10

bugle

10

mirror

13

flail

15

empty bag

15

amulet

20

potion

20

food ration

20

lichen corpse

20

unicorn horn

20

mace

30

dragon scale mail

40

long sword

40

spellbook

50

fauchard

60

pick-axe

100

plate mail

450

iron ball

480

loadstone

500

human corpse

1450

dragon corpse

4500

boulder

6000

Special rules
If you are polymorphed into a giant, boulders in your inventory have no weight.
A bag of holding modifies the weight of its contents - an uncursed bag of holding effectively reduces the weight of its contents by 1⁄2, and a blessed one does so by 3⁄4, while a cursed one doubles the weight. The weight of the bag itself is always 15 aum.

Strategy
In a few cases, weight testing can be a way to identify objects, especially after price identification.