costly

UK/ˈkɒst.li/

adjectiveC1Common in everyday speech and writing · #6,772 of 15,258leans written

Other forms: costliest, costlier

Costly means expensive, or damaging in what it takes from you. A costly mistake, costly repairs, a costly victory.

A costly mistake need not cost money at all — the cost may be time, trust or a career. A costly victory is one won at such a price that it is barely worth having, which is the same idea as a pyrrhic victory.

Definitions of costly

1adjectivecostlyExpensive, or damaging in what it takes from you.C1
“Repairing the old roof would be too costly, so they decided to sell the house.”

costly is a quality.

Where it comes from

From cost plus -ly, from Old French coster, from Latin constare, to stand at a price.

Middle English
costly
English, today
costly

From Middle English costly, costely, costeley, equivalent to cost + -ly.

Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA

Practise this word

costly in the wild

Both cribbage and its close relative costly colours are descended from the old English card game of noddy.
Cribbage
Cribbage added the distinctive feature of a crib and changed the scoring system for points, whereas costly colours added more combinations but retained the original noddy scoring scheme.
Cribbage
Due to the complex and costly equipment required to extract and clarify juice from apples in large volume, apple juice is normally produced commercially.
Apple juice
I/O-space reads and writes to the MSCP controller, a less-expensive but still-costly operation, are similarly minimized.
Mass Storage Control Protocol
Cleaning such heaters is costly and the efficiency drops off rapidly as scale forms.
Steam, Its Generation and Use· Babcock & Wilcox Company

From Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. These sentences were written by other people about their own subjects; they are here to show the word at work, not as anybody’s opinion.

From Project Gutenberg, public domain. These sentences are from real books, shown to illustrate the word at work.

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