Expensive

How to spell expensive

9 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce expensive

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does expensive mean?

1. adjectiveCosting a lot of money; high in price.

Expensive in a sentence

• The repair turned out to be far more expensive than the original quote.

• They chose a cheaper hotel because the seafront one was too expensive.

Where does expensive come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word traces back to the Latin verb pendere, meaning 'to weigh' and, by extension, 'to pay', since payments in the ancient world were once literally weighed out in metal. The prefix ex-, meaning 'out', joined it to give expendere, 'to weigh out' or 'to pay out', the source of 'expend' and 'expense'. From the noun 'expense' English built the adjective 'expensive' in the early 1600s to describe something that causes a great paying out of money. The same pendere root sits inside a surprising family of words, including 'pension', 'pendant' and 'ponder', all of which carry an echo of weighing or hanging. The spelling trap is the middle: it is 'pens' (as in pension), not 'pence', and the ending is '-sive', not '-cive'.

How the word is built

• ex- (out)
• pens (from pendere: to weigh out, pay)
• -ive (adjective suffix)