expensiveness

noun

expensiveness

noun

/ɛkˈspɛnsɪvnəs/ · [ɪk-]

Etymology From expensive + -ness.

1

Usually 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, https://books.google.ca/books?id=A6FgAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false 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, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14314/14314-h/14314-h.htm 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.
1 more example
  • 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.1938 April, George Orwell [pseudonym; Eric Arthur Blair], chapter IX, in Homage to Catalonia, London: Secker & Warburg, →OCLC:

Entry derived from the Wiktionary, under licence CC BY-SA 4.0 — list of authors.