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plural paperweights
A small, decorative, somewhat weighty object placed on one or more pieces of paper to keep them from fluttering away. quotations examples
The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone, essentially what today we might term a frameless magnifying glass or plain glass paperweight.
2013 September-October, Henry Petroski, “The Evolution of Eyeglasses”, in American Scientist
Any object used for this purpose. examples
(slang) A useless piece of equipment.