English edit

Etymology edit

expensive +‎ -ness

Pronunciation edit

  • IPA(key): /ɛkˈspɛnsɪvnəs/, [ɪk-], [-ˈspɪnsɪvˌnəs], [-ɪvˌnəs]
  • (file)

Noun edit

expensiveness (usually uncountable, plural expensivenesses)

  1. The state of being expensive; the entailing of great expense.
    • 1743, John Wesley, An Earnest Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, London: G. Whitfield, 1796, A Farther Appeal to Men of Reason and Religion, Part II, III.1, p. 212, [1]
      Surely you cannot be ignorant, that the sinfulness of fine apparel lies chiefly in the expensiveness. In that it is robbing God and the Poor; it is defrauding the fatherless and the widow; it is wasting the food of the hungry, and with-holding his raiment from the naked, to consume it on our own lusts.
    • 1922, Emily Post, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, Chapter 14: Formal Dinners, [2]
      Enchanting dining-rooms and tables have been achieved with an outlay amounting to comparatively nothing. ¶ There is a dining-room in a certain small New York house that is quite as inviting as it is lacking in expensiveness.
    • 1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter IX, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC:
      Apart from the expensiveness of everything, there were recurrent shortages of this and that, which, of course, always hit the poor rather than the rich.

Translations edit