Expensive means it costs a lot of money. A taxi across town at midnight, a dentist's bill, the shoes you look at twice and put back on the shelf.
It describes the thing, not the price and not the shop's numbers: prices are high, not expensive, though a restaurant with high prices is an expensive restaurant. An expensive mistake costs money without anything being bought — one wrong figure on a form and the whole shipment goes to the wrong country. Cheap is the plain opposite; inexpensive is the polite one, for when cheap would sound like an insult. Pricey is the friendly word, dear the old British one, and costly the one that turns up in news reports about repairs and delays.
1adjectiveexpensiveCosting a lot of money.~98%
“It was the most expensive meal we had ever eaten.”
synonyms: pricey, costly, dear
2adjectivecausingCausing a big loss, even where nothing is being bought.~2%
“Sending that email to the whole company was an expensive mistake.”
Shares are an estimate: a language model read 18 sentences found in the wild and placed 18 of them on a sense — a count of our sample, not a measurement of English.
Also accepted in games: dear, pricey
Expensive comes from Latin expēnsīvus, from expendō, to weigh out money, to pay out — paying was a weighing verb before it was a counting one. The same Latin word gave English expend and expense. In the sense of high-priced, expensive pushed the older English dear aside.
Latin
*expēnsīvus
English, today
expensive
Built from
From Latin expēnsīvus, from expendō (“to weigh out (money), to pay out”) (whence English expend). by surface analysis, expense + -ive. In the sense of "high-priced" has largely displaced dear.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA