Actually in the past "weight" or the Latin "pondus" (=> pound) always referred correctly to what is now named "mass".
When someone mentioned "weight" just in a qualitative way, as a burden, they might have thought at the force that presses someone down, but whenever they referred to weight in a quantitative way, they referred to the weight as measured with a weighing scale, which gives the ratio between the mass of the weighed object and the mass of a standard weight, independently of the local acceleration of gravity.
Methods that measure the force of gravity and then the mass is computed from the measured force, i.e. with the force measured either mechanically with springs or electrically, have appeared only very recently.
The distinction between force of weight and mass became important only since Newton, who used "quantity of matter" for what was renamed later to the more convenient shorter word "mass".
Perhaps it would have been better to retain the traditional words like weight and its correspondents in all other languages with the meaning of "mass", because this meaning has been used during more than 5 millennia and use a new word, e.g. gravitational force, for the force of weight, because we need to speak about this force much more seldom than about the mass of something.
> Actually in the past "weight" [...] always referred correctly to what is now named "mass".
That’s the same thing I just said. Why add “actually” in front? Yes, weight was historically measured with balance scales.
I guess I should have been clearer that the term “mass” as used in physics only dates from 3 centuries ago (from Newton), and did not historically mean weight in Latin. (Mass comes from Latin via French for lump of dough.)
You are right, I have misunderstood what you have said, because it indeed looked like if "mass" would have been some traditional word having anything to do in any language with what are now called "weight" and "mass" instead of a recent post-Newton word choice for naming one of the 2 quantities, while keeping the old names for the other.
I still think that the choice of which of the 2 should get a new name was bad, because the traditional quantitative meaning almost always referred to what is now called "mass"(with extremely few exceptions such when somebody would be described as so strong as to be able to lift a certain weight).
When someone mentioned "weight" just in a qualitative way, as a burden, they might have thought at the force that presses someone down, but whenever they referred to weight in a quantitative way, they referred to the weight as measured with a weighing scale, which gives the ratio between the mass of the weighed object and the mass of a standard weight, independently of the local acceleration of gravity.
Methods that measure the force of gravity and then the mass is computed from the measured force, i.e. with the force measured either mechanically with springs or electrically, have appeared only very recently.
The distinction between force of weight and mass became important only since Newton, who used "quantity of matter" for what was renamed later to the more convenient shorter word "mass".
Perhaps it would have been better to retain the traditional words like weight and its correspondents in all other languages with the meaning of "mass", because this meaning has been used during more than 5 millennia and use a new word, e.g. gravitational force, for the force of weight, because we need to speak about this force much more seldom than about the mass of something.