Precious vs Expensive - What's the difference?
precious | expensive |
Of high value or worth, or seemingly regarded as such.
* {{quote-magazine, date=2013-08-16, author=(Polly Toynbee)
, volume=189, issue=10, page=21, magazine=(The Guardian Weekly)
, title= Regarded with love or tenderness.
(pejorative) Treated with too much reverence.
(pejorative) Contrived to be cute or charming.
* {{quote-news, year=2012, date=May 24, author=Nathan Rabin, work=The Onion AV Club
, title= Someone (or something) who is loved; a darling.
* J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
* 1909 , Mrs. Teignmouth Shore, The Pride of the Graftons (page 57)
Having a high price or cost.
* {{quote-book, year=2006, author=
, title=Internal Combustion
, chapter=1 * {{quote-magazine, date=2013-06-22, volume=407, issue=8841, page=68, magazine=(The Economist)
, title= (computing) Taking a lot of system time or resources.
As adjectives the difference between precious and expensive
is that precious is of high value or worth, or seemingly regarded as such while expensive is having a high price or cost.As a noun precious
is someone (or something) who is loved; a darling.As an adverb precious
is Used as an intensifier.As a proper noun Precious
is {{surname|from=nicknames|lang=en}}, originating as a male or female nickname.precious
English
Alternative forms
* pretious (obsolete)Adjective
(en adjective)Britain's booming birthrate, passage=People are a good thing, the most precious resource in a rich economy, so the progressive-minded feel. Only misanthropists disagree or the dottier Malthusians who send green-ink tweets deploring any state assistance for child-rearing.}}
Film: Reviews: Men In Black 3, passage=In the abstract, Stuhlbarg’s twinkly-eyed sidekick suggests Joe Pesci in Lethal Weapon 2 by way of late-period Robin Williams with an alien twist, but Stuhlbarg makes a character that easily could have come across as precious into a surprisingly palatable, even charming man.}}
Synonyms
* (of high value) dear, valuable * (contrived to charm) saccharine, syrupy, tweeNoun
(es)- “It isn't fair, my precious , is it, to ask us what it's got in its nassty little pocketses?”
- She sat down with the dogs in her lap. "I won't neglect you for any one, will I, my preciouses ?"
Adverb
(-)- There is precious little we can do.
External links
* (wikipedia "precious")expensive
English
Alternative forms
* expencive (archaic)Adjective
(en adjective)citation, passage=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: […] .}}
T time, passage=[…] 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.}}