Wights are slightly harder to hit, and can sustain more damage, than ghouls but, like them, don't appear to wear any armour or carry weapons. The wight in the illustration has unkempt hair and long nails, but is basically just an animated corpse, albeit more intact than the typical zombie. These mythical "wights" were said to be corpses animated by the souls of their original inhabitants, pulled back from the afterlife, usually to guard their tombs, although they were capable of travelling out at night to take revenge on those who had wronged them, and they often had a range of magical abilities. Tolkien's barrow-wight, however, was quite closely based on the undead of Norse myth - named draugr in the original language - and the original D&D version is clearly, in turn, based on that. However, in his universe, it's the White Walkers that most closely resemble D&D's wights, although there are a number of clear differences, not least in terms of how they are created. Martin when he chose the word to describe his own, more zombie-like, beings. It's likely Gygax's coinage that influenced George R.R. Gygax abbreviated it back to "wight" again for D&D, while retaining the "undead" meaning. This term, of course, was later borrowed by Tolkien in Lord of the Rings. In 1869, however, a translator used the term "barrow-wight" (literally "tomb-person") to describe a form of undead from Norse legends. After that, it becomes somewhat old-fashioned, and it's unlikely that anyone much has used the word in this sense for over a hundred years, at least outside of poetry. It was common enough in this sense in medieval English, and into at least the seventeenth century (Shakespeare uses it, for one).
The word "wight", as D&D books are always eager to remind us, originally just meant "person".
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