Price

How to spell price

5 letters · 1 syllable

How to pronounce price

What does price mean?

1. nounThe amount of money for which something is sold or bought.
2. verbTo decide or fix the amount of money to charge for something.

Price in a sentence

• noun

  The price of the flight doubled over the holiday weekend.

• verb

  The manager wants to price the new range below its rivals.

• noun

  She compared the price at three shops before buying the kettle.

• verb

  They plan to price each ticket according to the seat location.

Where does price come from?

Language of origin: Latin

The word comes from the Latin pretium, which meant 'value', 'worth', or 'the reward paid for something'. That noun passed into Old French as 'pris' (also spelled 'prys'), carrying the sense of value or the amount paid, and English borrowed it in the 1200s. Interestingly, the same Latin pretium is the ancestor of several related English words, including 'prize', 'precious', and the verb 'appreciate', all of which still turn on the idea of something having worth. Over time English split the spellings so that 'price' settled on the cost of a thing while 'prize' came to mean a reward won, even though they began as the same word. The 'c' before the 'e' gives the soft sound, which is why the spelling ends in '-ice' rather than the more phonetic '-ise' that catches some writers out.

How the word is built

• price (a single root from Latin pretium: value, worth, reward; no prefix or suffix)