noun — the state, and the person standing in it coined here
bih-TWEEN-weight
The state of having outgrown one category without yet reaching the next, and the person in it: too big for Bikini, too small for Figure, eligible for nothing. Named like a weight class in order to mark the place where one is missing.
Two years of work, and now she's a betweenweight — there is nothing she can enter.
Etymologybetween (Old English betwēonum, be + the dative of twā, 'two' — literally 'by twos') + -weight, the element that names the fighting classes: flyweight, welterweight, middleweight, cruiserweight. The suffix is lifted from the one system that has always answered this problem by subdividing; the base insists there are exactly two things and that you are neither.
NoteThe stress gives the word away. Every real class name in the sport is a trochee with the beat on the first element — FLYweight, MIDDLEweight, HEAVYweight, BIKIni, FIGure — and between is be-TWEEN, iambic, and stays that way in the compound: bih-TWEEN-weight. This lexicon's founding rule is that stress may travel one syllable and never two. Here it refuses to travel at all, and the refusal is the definition read aloud: the word will not scan into the list it is named for. -weight does not name a mass, it names an eligibility. Nobody is a heavyweight by weighing something; they are a heavyweight because a federation agreed to weigh them and wrote the result on a card. betweenweight keeps that grammar exactly and removes the federation. It is a class with all the morphology of a class and no card behind it. Every real division was a betweenweight first. Cruiserweight, super-middleweight, light-heavyweight — each exists because enough people stood in a gap long enough that the sport wrote them a rung. The IFBB Pro League did it again in 2020, adding Wellness between Bikini and Figure. So the word is built to expire: it names the condition that ends when the taxonomy catches up, and it is the taxonomy, not the body, that is behind. Outside the gym it is everywhere, and always read as the person's fault. Too senior for the junior title and too junior for the senior one. Too literary for genre and too genre for literary. Past seed and short of Series A. In every case the shortfall is announced and the growth is not, though the growth is what caused it. This is the only state of being you arrive at by getting better at something. And the slot was already filled. The reel that prompted this word had the word in it: bliss_nine put FIGURINI on the screen and the caption underneath it — https://www.instagram.com/bliss_nine/reel/DdU6fpTO0Vn/ — and this entry was written from the caption alone, without reading the title. The search that was run checked whether betweenweight was taken. It was not. The question that mattered was whether the sense was taken, and it was, by the person who had the thing to name. Kept as a record because the failure is the lesson this project is about: the work of coining is mostly the work of finding out that someone got there first, and that check has to come before the morphology, not after it. The stress argument above still holds. It is a decent word for a slot that did not need one. See figurini.