To outweigh means to be more important, valuable, or significant than something else. When one thing outweighs another, it matters more or carries more weight in a decision.

Imagine you're deciding whether to try out for the soccer team. The practices are long and tiring (a negative), but you love soccer, you'll make new friends, and you'll get better at the sport (positives). If those benefits outweigh the difficulty of practices, you'll probably try out. The good points matter more than the bad ones.

Parents use this kind of thinking constantly. The costs of a family vacation might be high, but if the joy and memories outweigh the expense, they'll book the trip. A scientist might find that the benefits of a new medicine outweigh its side effects, meaning it helps more than it harms.

The word comes from the literal idea of weight: if you put a bowling ball on one side of a scale and a tennis ball on the other, the bowling ball outweighs the tennis ball. But we usually use outweigh for abstract things like importance, risk, or value, rather than actual weight.