expensive

Alternative forms

• expencive (archaic)

Etymology

From Latin expensivus, from expendere, compare expense.

Pronunciation

• (General American, Received Pronunciation) IPA^(key): /ɪkˈspɛnsɪv/, /ɛkˈspɛnsɪv/

• Audio (UK)

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• Audio (US)

  (file)

Adjective

expensive (comparative more expensive, superlative most expensive)

1. Having a high price or cost.
   • 2006, Edwin Black, chapter 1, in Internal Combustion‎:

     If successful, Edison and Ford—in 1914—would move society away from the ever more expensive and then universally known killing hazards of gasoline cars: […] .

   • 2013 June 22, “T time”, in The Economist, volume 407, number 8841, page 68:

     […] a new study of how Starbucks has largely avoided paying tax in Britain […] shows that current tax rules make it easy for all sorts of firms to generate […] “stateless income”: […]. […] the firm has in effect turned the process of making an expensive cup of coffee into intellectual property.

2. (computing) Taking a lot of system time or resources.

   an unnecessarily expensive choice of algorithm